


in omnia paratus

by stargirlshalo



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gilmore Girls Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Ben owns a diner, Coffee Shops, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Rey doesn't have a kid, Rey loves coffee, Romance, Sexual Tension, did I accidentally write a coffee shop au, they're both dummies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-07-06 11:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15885411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stargirlshalo/pseuds/stargirlshalo
Summary: There are many paths in life. There’s the “Hey, you’re cute, sure, I’ll marry you after graduation and med school” and the “Can you drive Susie to soccer today, ‘cause I’ve got a pediure?” path. And then there’s Ben Solo’s path, where he finds himself inheriting his father’s business in a quirky New England town right after graduation. And his uptight mother withholds his trust fund until he’s thirty, not that he’d ask for any help from her. He realizes he has to do it all by himself. Not easy. He becomes a flannel-wearing, coffee serving diner owner, and it just so happens that there’s a new girl in town who needs coffee in an IV.





	1. 1998

Six years ago, Ben’s life revolved around hockey, track, and Star Trek. He didn’t worry about the future, because he figured he was stuck in this boring New England town for all eternity. People seemed to live here until they died, so why should he be any different? There was rarely a new face, unless that new face was a newborn. He’d probably work in his dad’s hardware store and not amount to much, at least not until his trust fund kicked in when he was thirty—every time he fucked up as a kid, his mother had raised the age by a year. 

“And that,” his father told him while wiping grease smeared hands, “is why we’re divorced.”

Ben never bothered to point out to his uptight mother that he started acting out _because_ of the divorce. 

And suddenly, his plan was splintered, the pieces lodging themselves into every exposed bit of skin. That janky old car Han loved so much killed him. 

Or, he was in that janky old car when he died. T-boned by a truck on the highway. Ben still hadn’t shed his graduation robes. 

Five years later, and he’s in charge of his father’s old hardware store. After the funeral, Ben looked around the place helplessly as his mother pressed the cold metal keys into his clammy palm and told him, “Here’s your inheritance, kid.” 

He never felt so alone. 

Six years later, and he’s turned the place into a diner. The first day he was so nervous he ran in the back, threw up, and smacked his head on the ground when he passed out for a minute. Mitaka had to cover for him while he collected himself. Everyone in town flocked to the place, just to see how Ben had mutilated Han’s hardware shop. They came for the gossip, but they stayed for the omelets. 

He knows who comes in everyday, what time they come, and what they order. Chewie likes his bacon burnt to a crisp; Jess orders a grapefruit and herbal tea while longingly looking at Rose’s warmed muffin; Hux will spend fifteen minutes trying to persuade Ben to accommodate a gluten-free menu (at which point Ben brings him out a glass of water and an uncracked egg just to be spiteful).

This business keeps him comfortably afloat. He doesn’t have to grovel to his mother for money, which would inevitably come with strings attached, but he’s not crashing on Old Ahsoka’s musty couch. Or worse, in his uncle’s house.

It’s been a year and five months. Ben has a purpose, a reason to get up and shave in the morning, means to feed himself. He’s got self-preservation, he’s going through the motions, but he doesn’t feel whole yet. 

But then—

An annoying young girl comes barreling into his life. It was at lunch, it was a busy day at work, and the place was packed. She comes tearing in, her eyes wild, and interrupts him while he’s with a customer.

“Please tell me you have coffee,” she pleads. Ben doesn’t even turn to look at her, but from the corner of his eye he can see she’s wearing an old coat over some type of uniform, a dress of some sort. Her legs are bare, and in this weather, he’s surprised she hasn’t turned blue. 

“I might. If you wait your turn,” Ben says, his patience already wearing thin today. “How did you want your burger, Snap?”

“No, you see, I needed coffee six hours ago,” the girl interjects. “My crappy little machine broke, and I had to start my rounds, and long story short, I need coffee in an IV.”

Ben grits his jaw, the muscle below his left eye twitching the way it did when his temper was on the uptick, but he ignores her still. He snaps the tip of his pencil on his notepad with a resounding crack, and Snap flinches beneath him. 

“Medium-well,” Snap says quickly. 

“Have you ever tried to make a bed when you’re functioning on three hours of sleep and a severe lack of coffee?” The girl follows him around like a duckling, trampling his heels several times. He winces when her small shoes scrape his ankle twice. “I’m zombie-like in mental capacity today, and I still have a full day ahead. If I don’t have coffee, I stop doing the standing and the walking and the words putting into the sentence doing."

Even when he retreats behind the counter, she sidles up to him, actually invades his personal space and joins him behind the counter. “This is a jumbo coffee kind of morning. I need coffee in an IV.”

Ben finally turns to look at the little nuisance. He expected to find a shrew, but before him is a hazel eyed, freckled-nose girl who couldn’t be older than twenty. Her face is devoid of makeup, he sees she has dark bags below her bloodshot eyes, and her hair is tossed up in an unflattering bun that’s falling apart. 

He hasn’t had a crush since Alyssa Milano. But this girl...well, she’s prettier than Alyssa Milano. 

“I need caffeine. Whatever form you've got. I haven't had any all day. I'll drink it, shoot it, eat it, snort it, whatever form it's in.”

His irritation returns. She was like one of those wretched furies from Greek mythology. “How about you sit down, shut up, and wait your turn.”

At the counter, Paige Tico’s jaw actually drops. 

The girl’s eyes narrow, a flinty determination to them, and she sets her jaw. 

“What’s your birthday?”

Ben frowns. “What?”

“The day you were born. Which day was it?”

“None of your business.”

His blood is near boiling now. When he turns to Paige, the girl circles the counter and hops up on a stool right in front of his nose. Ben snaps the actual pencil in half this time. 

“That’s a waste of a tree,” the girl comments. 

“You’re impossible,” Ben snaps.

“I love coffee. I worship it. I have a cup up on the mantel at home with the Virgin Mary, a glass of wine, and a dollar bill next to it,” she tells him. “Which is why you should take that piping hot pot of morning joe and pour it into one of those fabulously large mugs right next to you and then set it right here in front of me.”

She talks too much. Her voice is grating on his eardrums, an annoying case of tinnitus, her accent foreign and loud. 

“His birthday is in November,” Paige supplies. She grins smugly at him, probably repayment for that time in high school when he was supposed to take her to the dance but spent the night with the flu instead. 

The girl beams, stealing the paper from a customer beside her, yet another reason he should just throw her out, and turns to the horoscope section. She writes something down under Scorpio, tears it out and hands it to Ben. 

_You will meet an annoying woman today. Give her coffee and she’ll go away._

Ben frowns deeply. 

Then it hits him. That cavity in his chest that had gauged itself open in the absence of his father suddenly didn’t feel so...hollow. 

Ben doesn’t know much, but he knows three things right now: this girl is pretty, this girl is annoying, but this girl gummed up the hole in his heart, however briefly. 

For that, he pours her a cup of coffee. 

Their fingers brush briefly, her eyes snapping up to his. “Keep that horoscope,” she says. “Carry it around. It might bring you luck.”

He tucks the flimsy piece of paper in his back pocket and goes about his day.


	2. 1999

As the son of Han Solo, Ben is held to certain expectations. He’s the town fixer-upper, just as New-Girl-Rey has become something of the town mechanic. Kaydel Connix employs the girl part time, and Kaydel is a picky, stubborn girl, so Rey must have had a talent with cars. Ben will see her bent over the hood of a broken car sometimes, wearing appallingly dirty overalls, covered in grease.

Since Han owned the hardware store, that naturally made him the former town fixer-upper. He was a man of many blue-collar skills: plumbing, mechanics, electrical. Carpentry was a craft he excelled at, making good money on the side. While he was on a delivery up in New York he met Ben’s mother, a business woman with a hectic schedule. They got hitched, Leia fell pregnant, and she stubbornly tried to be a corporate mom. Nursing a two month old and managing important accounts didn’t exactly work out, and back to Han’s hometown they went. 

For the first five years of Ben’s life, she dipped into entrepreneurial endeavors by beginning a line of organic baby products. Of course they were a phenomenon. She maintains that the Diane Keaton movie _Baby Boom_ was ripped off her life. But then the divorce happened, and Ben found himself hauled back to the city to be the brooding son of a neglectful working mother who stretched herself paper thin. 

But Ben made his way back. So when Han died, it was convenient for everyone that he left an heir. 

That’s how Ben is stuck spending his Tuesday morning about to clean the rain gutters over Kaydel’s shop, where New-Girl-Rey happens to be working on Mr. Krennic’s Cadillac. 

“Late again, are we?” she calls, half her body still underneath the car. 

“Yes, I hope I’m not pregnant,” Ben deadpans. 

Rey rolls out from under the car, wide-eyed. She’s flushed and sweaty, and he can smell her from where he’s standing with his bucket and gloves. “Oh, sorry,” she says, wiping her dirty hands on a rag. “I thought you were Kaydel. She isn’t in yet.”

He keeps his distance, rooted to the spot like a Red Oak. She tries to wait for him to talk, but gives up. 

“Do you want something to drink? You have good timing because Kaydel shopped yesterday, and in edition to a bottle of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara, she also happened to buy some freaky Coke with the lemon in it. Very addictive,” she rambles. There’s an outdated fridge in the shop garage that she makes her way over to, tossing a can at him. 

Ben catches it with his large, baseball glove-like hand, but says nothing. He’s never been talkative, only bantering with people he’s known his entire life. 

“How are you?” She blinks at him innocently with molten gold eyes, brighter than any of the honeyed New England autumn leaves, and he caves. 

“I’m fine.” 

Her face tells him this isn’t enough, but that was honestly a lot of effort for him. What more does she want from him? 

“Hey, did Luke tell you he bought an apartment building on Peach? You should check it out, they’re really nice,” she says. “So are the ones on Plum. And Orange...and any...fruit themed streets.”

Ben nods, grimacing a little. Luke moved to town after visiting when Ben was a baby and ended up rooting himself here. He was buying up half the town, thanks a hefty inheritance after the death of his mother—almost forty years ago. His mother had her own accumulated fortune, after going into business with the Organas, whose name she adopted (Grandpa Skywalker had been a walking scandal, apparently). But he knew she still had the Amidala money to lean on. 

And she wasn’t giving him a cent of it for another five years. _If_ he didn’t piss her off. 

“Um, I’ll let you get started. There’s a ladder over there,” she says. 

It’s a humid August morning and it’s too early to be scraping shit out of rain gutters. His hands are filthy, his knees are sore, and he keeps getting distracted by the bird’s eye view of Rey’s ass. A very perky, round ass. 

He shakes his head, trying to get into the headbanging Metallica CD she put on. At least she didn’t have bad taste in music. 

It’s around eleven when Rey gives a frustrated grunt and throws a wrench at Krennic’s Cadillac. He hides a smirk, hoping she dented the car. Krennic was an old geezer, one of Ben’s least favorite customers. 

“Ben, you want lunch? I brought a ton of leftover Chinese food,” she calls, stalking into the garage. 

He hesitates. Yeah, he’s hungry, but he also doesn’t like to leave Mitaka in charge of the diner too long. The kid gets uncomfortable when Hux comes in being his usual strange self, and flustered if Chewie comes in with his garbled Russian, or Luke and his anal demands. 

He feels rude turning Rey down though, so his stomach wins out. She looks baffled to see him accept the invitation, even though she offered. 

“Hey,” she says with uncertainty. “Basically everything here is chicken. Garlic Chicken, Kung Pao Chicken, Szechuan Chicken, chicken in brown sauce—which looks and tastes remarkably like the Szechuan Chicken, except it’s got these red peppers in it and if you eat them you die.”

God, she’s like a pop-up book from hell. He holds up his dirty hands, shuffling over to the sink to wash them. “When’s the last time Kaydel had those gutters cleaned?”

Rey piles a heaping portion of chicken on her plate—more than any tiny person should be able to stomach. “It’s been a while. Before the nineties, I’d say.”

“Yeah, I found an ‘I Like Ike’ bumper sticker up there,” he tells her. The soap smells like oranges, a scent that clings to Rey. He often smells it in the diner when she’s around. 

He turns around to find her with a troubled expression, shoveling food into her mouth and chewing angrily. She ordered the entire chicken column off the menu, judging by the amount of containers on the rickety table. 

Ben sits down, waiting to microwave his food. There’s some crooner on the radio now, and for the first time, he finds himself in an uneasy silence. 

“You have grease on your face,” he says. “Just there.”

He reaches out with the spit-slick tip of his thumb and smears it away, her freckles reemerging. _Much better._

“It’s from that stupid car,” she says. “It’s a misogynistic car. It's anti-woman, it's gender-selective, it's ‘Oh, let's drink a beer and watch the game and hike our shorts up.’”

He peeks back at the Cadillac, smirking. Like father, like son. 

“Go ahead, laugh at me,” she snaps. “But tell me something: you seem to have a firm grasp of the English language. You put together full sentences, even using a couple of words that contain two or more syllables. And then I come around, and suddenly I need a thought bubble over your head to understand what you’re thinking. Can you tell me why that is?”

It was difficult not to get tongue-tied around a girl who rambles at the speed of light about any given topic. She’s utterly unpredictable. It’s part of her package—the caffeine addicted, infuriatingly charming wordsmith. 

“The verbal thing comes and goes.”

Rey lets her fork clatter to the table, her chest heaving. “You know, your _Breakfast Club_ audition is getting really good. But I’m a little sick of it. I know you hate me, but can you at least manage a smile, or a pleasant conversation every once in a while? Or is that too hard for you?”

Ben chews his food methodically, letting her words turn over in his brain for a minute. His father was a grunter, and sometimes the only way to know if he liked you was when he surprised you with a homemade coffee table. Ben sometimes couldn’t tell if his dad liked him. Han had an added intolerance for small talk, stupidity, and admitting mistakes. All of which he had in common with Leia. 

But maybe Rey wasn’t used to that. 

“I don’t hate you.”

“But—”

“No.”

She tilts her head the way a confused hound would, as if this information is so alien to her. 

“Oh.” 

After a moment, Ben adds, “You look like little birds help you get dressed in the morning.”

Rey smiles wryly, stabbing a piece of chicken coated in a sticky brown sauce and tossing it in her mouth, satisfied with that explanation. 

They eat the rest of their lunch in a comfortable silence. 

 

***

“Hey.” Rey sidles up to Ben as he’s serving the Jyn Erso and her father. “A backwards baseball hat. New look for you.”

He barely spares her a glance. She’s wearing a black blazer with a B52s t-shirt underneath. It almost makes him laugh; who is she to judge? 

She’s like a toddler. He loses sight of her for even five seconds and suddenly she’s behind his counter serving herself cherry pie. 

“REY.” Ben storms over to her, cutting off Galen mid-sentence. “What have I said about the counter?”

“I know,” Rey says. “But—”

“The counter is a sacred space,” Ben insists, herding her away. “You don’t do yoga on the Dalai Lama’s mat, and you don’t come behind my counter.”

“I was saving you some time,” Rey whines. 

He backs her into a seat and leans over her, seething. “You need a leash.”

Rey smiles. “I love it when men talk dirty to me.”

Ben reddens and she laughs, as was usual for them. She’s honed in on a sweet-acid tone when she talks to him, mastered it like an art form, and her words always linger in the hollow chambers of his heart like dusty corners unreachable by broom. 

He leaves her with a withering stare. But that doesn’t mean his eyes aren’t drawn to the way the street lamps dance across the golden-brown strands of her hair like undulating candlelight. This only makes him irritated with himself; he can’t pay attention to what he’s doing with her distracting him. His eyes drift back to her like beams of light getting sucked up by a black hole. 

The diner clears out early today on account of it being Christmas Eve. He’s about to head upstairs and watch Star Trek for old time’s sake when he sees Rey holding her umpteenth cup of coffee close to her chest, wistfully gazing at the snow falling out the window. She’s all alone on Christmas Eve. 

Ben hesitates before walking up to her. “You want your usual?”

Almost every day she orders a cheeseburger with two strips of bacon. No matter how many lectures on the cons of fatty foods, she doesn’t budge. 

“Actually, can I see a menu?”

He’s waiting for the punchline that never comes. “You come here every day.”

“Tonight I’m in the mood for something a little different.”

Ben obliges, and he gets a whiff of her hair—which smells annoyingly like strawberries in rain, a fruit which he’s allergic to—and he’s certainly not looking at the swell of her cleavage as she leans forward. 

She stares at it for a long while before he impatiently says, “It’s not in Japanese.”

Rey pouts, her voice growing petulant. Ben doesn’t really like kids, and he hates when she reminds him of one. “Don’t you have anything festive?”

“I have a bag of cranberries from Thanksgiving,” Ben says. 

“I guess I’ll just have a burger.” Her shoulders slump. 

Ben considers her from the kitchen. Rey is a young girl all alone on the most family oriented holiday of the year. There are couples walking hand in hand outside, smiling broadly, children laughing. But Ben and Rey are all alone, street lamps casting long shadows in the blue-dark of his eerily quiet diner, the world outside muted in a blanket of snow. He has no one, save for his senile uncle. And whatever whim brought her to this town, it brought her alone. 

He knows what it is to be lonely. He knows she was right about him, and he’s ashamed for treating her so indifferently. 

This is how he finds himself cutting a piece of Wonderbread, smearing some ketchup on it, and piping cream cheese. He almost throws the damn thing out, he feels so ridiculous. He can feel the tips of his ears flushing red as he gives it to her. Thankfully, he always kept his hair long. 

Rey smiles fondly at the creation. “You made me a Santa Burger.”

“You wanted something festive,” he says defensively. 

“He has a hat and everything!”

“It was no big deal.”

“I’ve never had something so festive and disgusting. Thank you,” she says, her eyes warm. 

He hovers for a minute. Ben can’t just leave and say, ‘Hey, lock up when you finish. Thanks!’ Nor does he know her well enough to feel comfortable sitting with her. 

She eyes him knowingly. “You’re wondering why I’m all alone on Christmas Eve, and where I came from, and what my deal is.”

Ben sputters. “No, I just—”

“My parents abandoned me,” she says. “I lived with a distant relative for a while before being put in the foster care system. I ran away after living with a bad man who did...illegal business. I barely graduated high school before running. I made my way up Connecticut, and I finally landed here.” 

He realizes then just how little he knows about this girl. When she first came to town, he heard the gossip, catching words like “runaway” and “maid.” He had concocted this narrative about a secretly pregnant cheerleader hiding from her suburban parents in an attempt to avoid the disdained looks of their conservative, tennis-playing, tea drinking friends. 

What he hadn’t thought of was a street hardened, unwanted orphan who was just trying to find her place in the world. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,” she says. She juts her chin out and holds it high. “I’m not broken. Maybe just a little chipped.”

He pictures Rey running for the hills in her graduation robes, and juxtaposes it with the memory of him sitting alone in the hardware store in his graduation robes, head bowed, a slice of uneaten cake Luke had brought him in front of him. 

_Your father was in an accident,_ Luke told him, cake in hand. _It’s bad—really bad, kid. Your mother is coming down._

And that was how Ben knew Han was dying. His mother would never leave work for anything other than a funeral obligation. She must’ve really loved Han at some point, because he had never seen his mother cry before. 

He cuts two pieces of cherry pie, sits down, and slides Rey a plate. 

***

He would like it if his heart stopped leaping from his chest every time she walked into the diner. And he would prefer if he hadn’t started to notice the male attention she received, from sweet-but-clumsy Snap to out-of-his-mind Mr. Tekka. He can’t make heads or tails out of this phone order he scribbled down since Rey is in his periphery, sinking her teeth into a donut and moaning in an ungodly way. 

Then she gets that look—that glimmer in her eye, a twist of her mouth—and he knows the babbling is about to make him forget his own name. 

“Hey, did anyone ever think that maybe Sylvia Plath wasn't crazy, she was just cold?”

“Rey.”

“If you ever left the comfort of this small building you’d know it was freezing outside,” Rey says, unraveling her scarf. “Some of us peasants have to trek a few miles in the snow for a decent cup of coffee.”

Her eating habits are disgusting. Pop Tarts are a staple, along with Chinese takeout and greasy food from his own diner. He can’t help but wince when he thinks of the build up in her arteries. 

“I can give you tea and a balance bar.”

Rey just holds out an empty cup. “One bag of coffee per cup of water, right?”

“Do you wanna know what this stuff does to your central nervous system?” 

Rey smiles angelically. “Do you have a chart? I love charts.”

“Forget it, kill yourself. It’s your body,” Ben relents. He always relents. 

“You’re pretty,” she sighs, beaming as the dark waterfall of bean juice fills her cup. 

“This should blacken your teeth and rot your stomach,” Ben throws in for her benefit. 

“Speaking of rotting stomachs,” Rey starts, “someone left me a question mark on the side of their shower today. Made out of their hair.”

“You should be paid more,” Ben says, grimacing. Gwen Phasma is eying him knowingly over her cup of chamomile. 

_Flirt better,_ she mouths. 

He ignores her.

“For once I agree with you,” Rey says. “It’s been such a bizarro day. I mean, it’s March. It should be Spring, and instead it’s like the Overlook Hotel in December. I think people at the Dragonfly are pretty high class, but my God, some of them are filthy.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “You work at the inn my _mother_ owns?”

Rey stops babbling to look at him funny. “Leia Organa is _your_ mother?”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

She bites her lip, arching a brow as she shrugs. “I knew she had a son, but the way you talk about your mother...it doesn’t match the way she talks about you.”

He can imagine the long winded tales of her ungrateful, blue collar rebel of a son. The last time they spoke, they had a volcanic fight over Han’s funeral. He wanted to be buried with his prized baseball cards—Lou Gehrig's rookie card, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays. Leia called him selfish. _My maid has a little boy who would love those cards,_ she said. _King Tut over here doesn’t need them._

_You’ll have fired that maid by tomorrow,_ Ben said. No, he screamed it, tearing through his throat like the howl of a grieving wolf. His dad just wanted to be surrounded by the things he loved, even in death. Was that so terrible?

“Did she frighten you?” Ben asks. “Did you think I was a monster?”

“At first I thought you hated me,” she admits. He recalls that summer day he fixed Kaydel’s disgusting rain gutters. “Then I thought you were lonely. I just wanted to cheer you up.”

He thinks of all her attempts to befriend him, her incessant babbling giving him a headache when he was just trying to do his job. 

“I guess it didn’t work.”

But then he remembers how, even then, his heart clenched when she sat across from him. She wore a holey jacket and ratty boots. She would sit at a table, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth, attempting to sew patches over the holes with floss. Sometimes, she tried to coax his fat fingers into tugging out a particularly stubborn stitch. 

What she didn’t realize was how he subtly sat Maz Kanata close to Rey—that way, she would take pity and give Rey sewing lessons. And Maz would bring the good kind of string. He always felt indebted to her for closing up his heart the same way she laid patches over the holes in her jacket. 

“It did.” 

There’s a beat. Rey looks like she wants to ask what he means, but she doesn’t. And he doesn’t offer an explanation. 

“I actually told Kaydel I would help her,” Rey says, checking her watch with a frown. “I’ll see you later?”

Rey takes one look at the bleak, icy day outside, her face crumpling in abject misery as she hugs her ragged coat closer to her body. 

“I wish it was summer.”

 

***

“By the way, I think you might be the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, outside of a really filthy magazine.” 

This is what Ben hears a few days later. Rey is half inside the diner, half outside, dubiously nodding at Hux, who has just uttered the strangest sentence Ben has ever heard out of context.  


Rey has the look of every girl who has been forced into that sort of uncomfortable interaction with a man. But Hux is harmless, so he allows himself a little laugh. She sits in front of him, her face red. 

“Is Armie...you know. All there?” 

“He lives with his mother, he’s worked every job this town has to offer, and he thinks my uncle is his surrogate father,” Ben tells her. “You tell me.”

He pours her coffee and she blinks at him, stunned. “What, no lecture?”

“My blood sugar is low,” Ben lies. “I’ll eat an apple and get back to you.”

“I’ve been getting a lot of compliments today,” she says, trying not to sound too pleased with herself. “I think this new coat has people fooled.”

“Ah,” Ben says. Her skin is peachy against the pale blue of the expensive looking coat, and her hair is done in shiny chestnut curls today. He even thinks he spies a bit of mascara and lipstick. 

“Well, you look nice.”

She grins impishly. “Thanks. I had a flagellation to go to.”

“Lovely.”

She tugs at one of her curls self-consciously. “I think this coat is worth more than my potting shed. Some rich dad at the inn actually tracked me down to ask me out. I think he smelled the rich lady perfume on this thing and followed his nose.”

Ben is trying to fish out a burnt crust of bread from inside his toaster, but he briefly freezes when she tells him this. His eyes flit to hers for a moment before he continues to scrape around the appliance.

“You going?”

“Nah,” she says. “He’s got a kid. And he didn’t understand my _Pretty Woman_ joke.”

“Good.”

Rey arches her brow delicately. “Good?”

He turns his back on her for a moment to grab a longer utensil, cursing under his breath as he does so. “Yeah, I think it’s good you turned him down. He’s probably...old.”

Rey laughs with disbelief. “Old?”

“Yeah, he’s got a kid. Aren’t people with kids…”

“Old? Like the guy who asked me out?”

Ben pauses again. He hadn’t dared look at her; his father always said he had the worst poker face in the galaxy. _I always know when you’re lying,_ he had said. _You just get this look in your eyes and I know._

But now he’s turned the full heat of his gaze on her. And she reddens under it. 

“But you’re not going.”

Rey fiddles with the buttons on her coat. “No. I’m not going.”

Ben says nothing more, returning to his toaster with a too much intensity. Her cell phone starts ringing and she jumps. 

“Oh, that’s probably Kaydel. She’s got another job for me…” She fishes around her pockets. 

Ben grumpily points to the sign behind him that reads “NO CELL PHONES.” She just shakes her head fondly at him. 

“I wonder what crowd I’ll attract at the mechanic shop with this coat,” she jokes on her way out. He notices she doesn’t want to take it off, as though taking it off would be the metaphorical clock striking midnight—and she would be nothing more than a servant again.

And it was a beautiful, expensive coat with traces of Chanel No. Five buried in the thread. From the closet upstairs he had pulled out five different designer coats his mother left behind. Han had never gotten rid of them, and Ben never wanted to look at them. All he had to do was bribe Miss Mothma to pretend they were lost coats and prey on Rey. 

Ben should have known she would only take one. Oh well. He would just have to wait until next year to conjure up a lost coat problem in town again.


	3. 2000

Living in a storybook Connecticut town had its perks. Never hitting traffic, for example, because you made two left turns and you were back in the center of town. Ben would also argue there were a lot of faults. Like everyone showing up to his diner for brunch on Easter. It was bad enough he had to spend two hours at Luke’s in the early afternoon for honey baked ham. But to spend his morning running around overcrowded tables trying to keep track of what kind of milk Susie wants and making sure the eggs aren’t runny—it was sinful. 

He’s so swamped, he almost misses the fact that Rey came in. Twenty minutes ago, according to Paige Tico, who he’s given a part time waitressing job to. It’s only because of her distinct English accent that Ben realizes she’s here. Rey has the kind of magnetic personality that attracts crowds, but given the fact that it’s a holiday, the clamoring of people around her gives him pause. It’s only when she comes hobbling up to the counter he realizes why. 

“My life stinks. Hey, let’s look into each other’s eyes and say ‘I wish I were you’ at exactly the same time—maybe we’ll pull a ‘Freaky Friday.’” 

He fiddles with the register for a moment, trying not to stare at the enormous cast engulfing her entire leg. “Do I want to know?”

“I’ve learned that I’m a bit too competitive for yoga,” Rey says, chagrined. 

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Ben says. “I see you’ve made an art exhibit out of your cast though.”

“I had to spruce it up,” Rey admits, stretching her entombed leg out for him to see. “Rose stole some band stickers from Paige, and I had everyone sign—oh! Ben, sign my thigh!”

He nearly chokes. 

“Don’t be a grump about it,” Rey pleads. “I saved a space just for you. And if you happen to have any Solo’s Diner stickers…”

“I haven’t explored the sticker market yet,” he says. He takes a Sharpie from her and crouches down to ‘sign her thigh.’ 

It puts his face right near her crotch. He was pretty sure the last time his face was this close to the apex of a woman’s thighs he was still in high school. 

For the first time in a while, he feels a pang of Catholic guilt. It’s a holy day, after all. 

Other people have signed with hearts or condolences or small inspirational messages. Even Wedge the pizza guy had a place on her leg. He hovers for a moment before simply signing ‘Ben.’

“Speaking of sprucing things up,” Rey begins, “I was thinking that you should really give this place a coat of paint.”

“I don’t spruce,” Ben says quickly. This shop is exactly the way his father left it. He intends to keep it that way.

“What he means is he won’t spruce.” From the end of the counter, Luke swivels into the conversation. 

“Luke, do not start.”

“The Town Beautification Committee has been hounding Ben, and Han for that matter, for years to fix this place up. He won’t even go for a peppy little cardboard pig out front to announce the specials,” Luke complains. “My nephew is a mule. He won’t talk or reason. Forget sprucing, Rey.”

“How about this,” Rey starts. “I’ll help you. We can paint at night so you won’t lose money.”

Ben hates himself for actually stopping to consider this offer. He finds people draining, and enjoys his nights to himself. Spending the night with Rey, however...  


It doesn’t sound so bad. 

“Maybe if I had help,” he says begrudgingly.

Rey’s answering smile would have been worth it, until Luke starts to talk. 

“Oh my God,” Luke exclaims. “This is a miracle!”

“I’m not doing it for you, it’s for me.”

“I can’t wait to tell the committee,” Luke says, getting up. “They won’t believe this.”

Ben watches his uncle totter out the door, clenching his jaw. “I hate that he’s pleased.”

“When are you free? I need something to do with my hands.”

“Oh, no,” Ben says. “Not until your leg is healed.”

She pouts. “I’m so bored! I can't do my chores at the Dragonfly with one leg!” 

“Chores? Is that what you call it?”

“You know. Milking cows. Feeding chickens. Slopping pigs.”

“Slopping pigs?”

“Well, they’re certainly not going to slop themselves.”

Ben nods, but Dr. Kalonia’s impatiently rapping fingers distract him. He finds several beady pairs of eyes on him. He has to get a plate of waffles to Amilyn, a plain bowl of oatmeal to Hux, and he needs to bag a few donuts that Ahsoka asked for ten minutes ago. She’s talking to Saw, but they’re both looking at him with smug expressions as he talks to Rey.

In fact, everyone is looking at him and Rey with knowing smiles. The tips of his ears go red as he distances himself from her, irritated with how transparent he’s being. He really hates this town. 

“I guess you’re busy,” she sighs melodramatically. She makes a pathetic show of hobbling on her crutches. Ben watches her go, though he’s supposed to be serving his customers, and Ahsoka marches right up to the counter. 

“You’re both idiots,” she says. “I can’t believe your Leia’s offspring. When she wanted something, she went after it.”

Ben’s face boils. Through gritted teeth, he says, “Wasn’t my mother an unpopular member of the community while she was here?” 

Ahsoka grumbles, slapping a few dollar bills on the counter. “That doesn’t matter. The girl is alone on a holiday with a broken leg. Ever pick up a romance novel, sugar? Now give me my damn donuts.”

***

Luke’s Easter dinner is always shared with Maz and Chewie, the Andors—also Roman Catholic—Cassian’s girlfriend Jyn, Mr. Darklighter, and Hux and his mother. It always involves Ben strategically calculating when to stuff food in his mouth so he didn’t have to talk. 

This time, he baffles Luke with his request for leftovers. He’s given ten plastic containers of food, along with a warning to return the tupperware, which he puts in a cardboard box and carries to Rey. He can’t decide if he’s only doing this because Ahsoka got inside his head, or if the anxious trepidation that’s clanging inside his ribcage reflects his own eager expectations. 

“Well, if it isn’t Bilbo Bologna-puss, back from the Shire,” Rey greets him. “I hear you’ve been very crotchety after agreeing to paint the diner. Second thoughts?’’

“I just thought you might want some food,” he says. “It’s from Easter dinner. I thought it might be hard to...feed yourself.” 

“I broke my leg, not my fingers. Delivery is a thing,” Rey points out. 

“It’s the proper thing to do. When a girl gets hurt, you’re supposed to help them,” Ben lies. He forgot how stubborn she was with anything she perceived as charity. 

“Oh, yes. Ladies just wait helplessly and wait for some young strong man to come by and assist them. They don’t step in puddles, they don’t step over puddles. They can’t even look at puddles. They actually need to be blindfolded and thrown in a sack and carried over puddles.”

“You know how on _All in the Family_ when Edith would be yapping about something and Archie would pretend to make a noose and hang himself or shoot himself in the head? Something in this moment made me think of that,” Ben says, shoving the box into her arms. He was mortified. 

She grabs him by the jacket, contrite. “I’m just teasing, Ben. Come in! Eating alone is boring.”

Ben lets her tug him inside, albeit reluctantly. One look at the inside of her potting shed, located right behind the Dragonfly, had him regretting the decision. The room was filled with kitschy junk, obviously collected over a long period of time. The girl was a hoarder. 

Rey pulls out two plates, handing one two him. He has to do a double take. “Why are there scantily clad women on my dish?” 

She’s already helping herself to a heaping portion of potatoes. “They’re the original Charlie's Angels. It took me years to get a complete set. You can find the Kate Jacksons and the Sally Hacks pretty easily, even the Cheryl Ladds. But the Farrah Fawcetts and the Jacqueline Smiths are a little harder to come by, but still accessible. The trick is to find the Tonya Roberts. I have three.”

Leia would have an aneurysm. He almost laughed aloud at the thought of his mother sitting down for dinner, which was always served at seven, and looking down to find bikini-clad pop culture icons instead of her precious Waterford collection. 

“You brought me used dessert? I’m a little offended,” Rey says, holding up a half-eaten cheesecake. 

“It’s not used, it’s leftover,” Ben snaps.

“Nice. I’ll put it next to my half-empty box of Cheer,” she jokes. “But this manicotti is good enough that I forgive you.” 

“Yipee. A jig is forthcoming,” he says dryly. 

He helps himself to more cheesecake on a Sally Hack, though his belt is about to combust. She shovels food into her mouth, chewing in a way that makes his heart swell, as if she fears her food being taken away. 

“I never got to have good holiday dinners with any foster families,” she tells him through a mouth full of ham. “There was this old Baptist woman I lived with for two years, but her food was so lame. She exclusively made casseroles.”

Ben suddenly feels spoiled. Amilyn Holdo, probably the only woman in town who got along with Leia, cooked good food for the Solo’s. And when he lived with Leia, they had a gourmet chef. 

“I stayed with this nouveau-riche couple for a few months, and I was so excited because I thought I’d finally get a decent meal. They only ate seafood.” Rey wrinkles her nose at the memory. “Oysters, salmon, tilapia—just non-stop fish. It was a nightmare.”

Ben shifts in the ugly green chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He doesn’t know what to do when people get vulnerable with him. Han was always so gruff, and Leia was so callous—there was no such thing as sentimental with her. She was a real hard ass. She and Han probably never shared anything with each other. He could see how that would lead to their holy matrimony. 

And divorce. 

“Mr. Plutt may have been a shithead, but the pennies he threw at me each week in exchange for dealing with his cronies in a nonviolent manner were enough to get some real food.”

“Greasy takeout?” 

She beams at him. “I am nothing if not predictable.”

He doesn’t tell her how untrue that is. 

“You didn’t get along with any of your foster parents?” he guesses. 

“A distant relative took my in first. I think he was thrown in prison for smuggling hash over the border. Then came the aforementioned Baptist and rich couple, who tossed me just like my parents.” Her face contorts, her chin wobbling for the briefest moment. She collects herself in a blink. “A kid isn’t a duvet cover. You can’t just bring it back if it doesn’t like you, or becomes too much work to take care of.” 

“Some duvet covers are more special than others,” Ben says quietly. “They might be made out of Mulberry silk and French lace, and it takes a refined person to take care of them. Any old person off the street won’t do.”

Rey fights off a smile. “I had to learn the hard way that life doesn’t often spell things out for you or give you what you want exactly when you want it, otherwise it wouldn’t be called life, it would be called vending machine. But when I came here, it felt like I won a king sized candy bar.”

Her stare sends blood rushing to his face, and other places, with the thorough effect of a heat lamp. Now he knows what everyone is complaining about when they say they can’t look him in the eye. 

“Wanna watch a movie?” Rey suggests, unphased. His shoulders slump, and he realizes he was hoping his stare had the same effect on her. She wobbles over to the futon and collapses. 

Ben never really learned how to tell Rey no. Rey is appalled when he tells her no, he’s never seen _Casablanca._ He sits beside her on the crummy futon and he knows something is about to happen when she stares at him giddily while cupping her chin. 

“Stop looking at me,” he says. 

She has the audacity to be baffled. “Um, vain party, table for one.”

“You’re watching me watch the movie. It’s creepy.”

Her giggle is fucking adorable. He crosses his legs and arms and tries not to pay attention to the warm feeling in his chest. 

“I enjoy watching people watch certain parts of certain movies.”

And then—

And then. At the end of the movie, a sheepish expression crosses her face. 

“Um, Ben?”

He wants to laugh at the borderline mortified look on her face. “Yes?”

“It’s been four days since I last bathed. I’m starting to look like Smeagol, and I might smell like a sewer.”

“God, Rey—” 

“Please! I feel disgusting!” 

“Don’t say it.”

“Ben, if you care about me a smidgen you’ll help me shower,” Rey pleads. 

“Shouldn’t you ask one of your girl friends?” 

“Do you see one of them around right now?” She gestures wildly. “Paige and Rose are at their uber religious mother’s, and Finn is there too, not that I’d ask him. Don’t be such a prude, we aren’t Puritans.”

“Maz might be a good alternative,” Ben suggests. His face is burning. 

“For the love of God,” Rey groans. “I just need you to help me get to the inn, and I need you to make sure I don’t slip, fall, and die. Can you do that?”

“Fine,” he relents. He swallows hard. “But only because you made a _Lord of the Rings_ reference.”

“Thank you, Ben! Anything you want, it’s yours,” she says. “Grab a T-shirt before we go.”

He presses his lips together, not even sure what it is he wants from her, only knowing he wants _something._ But he blindly snatches a shirt off the floor and bridal carries her inside the actual inn, where there’s a bathroom downstairs she uses. Ben is hyper aware of her soft, fleshy body flush against his. 

“I’m going to take off my pants now,” Rey says, as if she’s talking to a kindergartner. “I wore granny panties just for you, just so you don’t melt or anything.”

She has to grab onto his bicep so she doesn’t tip over while shimmying her pants off, and boy, this was not how he pictured getting her naked—not that he pictured it or anything. The slight redness of her cheeks tells him that maybe the joke was for her sake more than it was his. She is actually wearing the ugliest pair of granny panties he’s ever seen. They’re branded onto the back of his eyelids, they’re so hideous. 

He has to help her wrap her leg in a plastic bag, trying very hard not to let his fingers linger on her thighs. Even though her legs are starting to get a downy coat on them, his belly is still throbbing. He also tries very hard to avert his eyes when she stands up and her rounded ass is on display, and especially when she peels off her shirt. She’s not wearing a bra, and through the cracks in his squeezed-shut eyes, he can see the blurry profile of her small, perky chest. 

But she was right: she sort of smells. Like bacon and old shoes. That’s the only thing keeping him from getting a hard-on right now.

Ben holds a very large, fluffy towel in front of his face when she steps out, so all he can see is her wet feet. 

“Jimmy Buffett?” Rey exclaims, examining the oversized shirt he brought. “I won’t be caught dead in this.”

 _“Rey,”_ he growls through his teeth. 

“Are you a Buffetthead or something? I don’t need some mellow middle aged man catching me in this and then getting the idea that he can serenade me with Margaritaville or something,” she argues. 

She has to be insane if she thinks he’s going to carry her towel-clad body back to the potting shed. 

“Can’t you put those back on?” he chokes. 

“No,” she says. “They’re dirty. They smell like ham. Do you want me to smell like ham?”

“Yeah, I fucking love it,” he lies. 

He’s about to argue further when he sees that she can’t even look him in the eye. Then he realizes her eyes are shiny, and it clicks: she’s humiliated to be asking him this. What girl wants to strip on front of a man wearing granny panties?

So he sucks it up and carries her back. It’s not so hard this time because he feels sorry, and she might be on the verge of tears so he would rather get there before she makes him uncomfortable. 

When she declares she’s hungry again, he orders a pizza, and when Rey decides the pepperoni is angry at the mushrooms because the mushrooms have an attitude, and then she holds up a pepperoni and the pepperoni asks for his opinion, he actually answers the damn pepperoni.

***

Eight weeks later, Rey moseys in with an unconstricted leg. She’s wearing a blue and orange striped jumpsuit, bounding around his diner with paint swatches. 

“We could go for a French Bistro theme?” she suggests, pinning blue and purple swatches to the wall.

“This isn’t a French Bistro,” he grumbles. He piles Gwen and Sloane’s empty plates on top of each other noisily. 

“It’s amazing what you learn when you listen,” Rey jokes. “Or we could do a warm, golden tuscan countryside.”

“Then go to Italy,” he says. He turns back to Gwen. “Here, I’ll wrap this up.”

Rey skips over to the door, unbothered. “Or maybe a pastel English garden theme. The motherland, you know.”

“None of this Martha Stewart stuff,” Ben orders. “And definitely no pink.”

Gwen and Sloane head out, not before Gwen points to the ‘English Garden’ swatch and says, “I like this. Pastels are everything.”

He gives Rey a sharp look that immediately has her removing the paint swatch with a grimace. 

“Okay, what about this.” She flounces over to the other side of the diner, where there’s a swatch that’s just about the same color as he has now. “This green is for the walls and the orangey shade is for the trim. You know, the edging around the doors—”

“I know what the trim is.”

“It’s just a little richer and warmer. How about it?”

Ben studies the swatch, looking from her eager expression to the faded paint from when his father was around. He can imagine Han smoking a cigarette, beer in one hand and roller in the other, staining a white shirt and listening to Elvis while ashes flaked and fell to his well-worn boots. These walls had a history. But....

“Do you like it?” he asks Rey. 

“It’s perfect,” she says. “Though you should get rid of some of this junk on the walls. Like the dancing pork chop.”

“Everything stays.”

Rey holds up her hands in surrender. “Okay, grouch.”

Ben takes a minute to grab a beer from the fridge, since he seemed to be reliving his father's life today. 

“I didn’t change a thing after my dad died,” Ben admits. “This stuff was all here. The paint, the tacky decor, the pork chop. I never had the heart to move it.”

Rey smiles sadly. “This was a hardware store, right?”

Ben leans on the counter, bracing his hand beside her so she was partially caged in. “Yeah. I wasn’t bad at cooking, since I had to learn when I realized Dad couldn’t cook for shit. When I realized he left the place to me, I didn't have the heart to sell it. It was a part of him.”

She stares up at him. “That must be nice. Having been so...connected to your father.”

Her eyes are shining, and he knows she’s thinking about soccer games and ballet recitals, and everything else she missed out on. But that isn’t exactly what Ben had with his father. 

“We didn’t always get along,” he tells her, taking a swig of beer. “I was bad when I first moved here. _Rebel Without a Cause_ bad. I was rude, I stole lawn gnomes, embarrassed Luke. I played hooky constantly. But one time he followed me to the mall. He asked, 'Tell me right now, kid, why aren't you in school?' and I tried to think of something. Some lie that would make sense, but I couldn't. All I could think was that a few months ago I was living with a mother who was trying to send me to boarding school and today I was with a father who thought I was unfixable. And I started to cry. I just sat there like an idiot, bawling. And finally, after what seemed like forever, I managed to control myself a little bit and I calmed down and I waited. I waited for him to yell at me, to punish me, to ground me forever. To tell me how disappointed he was in me, and nothing came. And finally I got up enough courage to look up at him, and he was standing there with with a pretzel. A giant pretzel covered in mustard.”

For once, Rey is speechless. Maybe he should have talked about the more torrid days, like the time Han pushed him into the pond in a blind fury. But after he died, none of that mattered. 

“Actually, behind you is spot on the wall where my dad took an order when he ran out of paper,” Ben says. Her eyes twinkle as she crawls on the floor to find it. He follows her, situating himself in the corner where she tucked herself. Their knees bump each other. 

“Three hammers, three boxes of nails, assorted sizes,” Rey reads. Her eyes soften. “Maybe we can leave this part unpainted.”

Ben feels like the Grinch, his heart swelling thrice its normal size. “He would’ve liked you,” Ben says. “You two would’ve bonded over cars, probably.”

Her eyes grow sad, the corners of her mouth turning down. “I would’ve liked to have met him,” she says, almost wistfully, as if she could picture him being a father to her. “He did a good job. With you, I mean.”

They gaze at each other for an extended moment that stretches years, or at least that what it feels like, because their smiles are fading and their eyes grow from sad to tender. 

Rey clears her throat. “I should go,” she says. When she stands up, he thinks her knees shake a little. “The place is gonna look great.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ben says, dusting off his jeans. “I bet.”

“See ya!”

 _Yeah, see you sticking to the side of my mind all night,_ Ben thinks bitterly. When she leaves, he polishes off his beer the way his old man did. Then he goes to look for some cold medicine to knock him out so he doesn’t lie awake all night with Rey on the brain.


	4. 2001

Ben would get more accomplished on any given day if it weren’t for Rey’s pretty eyes. He tries to focus on the curl of her lip, or the freckles dotting her nose, but her eyes always call him back like a siren’s song. He forgets to put swiss on the burger, neglects to put horseradish on the side, burns the fried—and all these blunders come back to him late at night, the common denominator being Rey’s big, hazel eyes. 

They’re the color of amber honey dripping thickly from a spoon, the color of burnished autumn leaves, of subaqueous jade gems. This time when she tears into his diner, a sapphire tsunami in her blue blouse, he keeps her broad back to him. Rey has gumption he admires, and rather than admit defeat, she tails him the way she’s done since the first day she stumbled into his diner. Ben is helpless when her fair face peeks at him across the counter and she channels the firepower of her round eyes on him. 

When she begs him to follow her into Finn’s car—which she borrowed without permission while he was fighting Rose about the quality of his mushrooms—he doesn’t even think about it. 

It’s midday, the diner is packed, and he forgot Galen’s pickles. But there’s a spider in Rey’s potting shed, so that has to wait. 

“Don't let his family see you. Spiders are vindictive,” Rey proclaims, clinging to the back of his shirt. “And this was a really big spider. I think it had a gun.”

In his boyhood, Ben was sensitive. Sweet was the word women always attributed to him. Han would’ve stomped on a spider with his big boot, but Ben would wail and clutch the stuffed Black Bear cub Han brought back from a hunting trip tightly to his chest. Once, Ben tried to salvage a spider whose leg had been clipped off. Han went into the kitchen, procured a paper clip, and got on his hands and knees with Ben to cure the arachnid of his handicap. But the sharp needled end went straight through his body and killed the the thing. 

_Listen, kid,_ Han told him. _You gotta kill these things. When a woman comes crying to you hysterically and demands you get rid of the thing, be a man and just stomp on it._

“Where do you want…?” he queries, gesturing to the long-legged creature trapped under a cup. 

“Little Satchmo,” Rey finishes. “Don’t kill him. Put it someplace shady. Sheltered from the elements. And close to a talking pig.” 

“Perfect.” His voice his hoarse, his eyes melting so that they’re soft when he looks back at her. Though he uttered just one word, it was sincerely meant to speak volumes. 

He remembers when he was a teenager, angry at the world, and Luke was preaching his Catholic wisdom at him. _Free up that heart of yours,_ he said. _Stop being so afraid to love._

This is the closest he’s felt to someone in a long time. In a kindred spiritual way, something beyond himself. He practices liberating his armored heart, allowing it to be unrestrained for a few minutes. 

Her potting shed is alongside a sapphire pond, which matches her shirt, bringing out the green in her eyes. They’re cooler when seagreen, aloof almost. Not like green eyes that gleam mean, or seductively twinkle at you. They don’t blaze the way they do when closer to brown. They’re simply cool, the way it was in the dark depths of the ocean. 

“I can’t believe my mother actually lets you live here,” Ben says. “For free.”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” Rey demands, her voice cracking like a whip. “I turn beds every morning, I scrub dirty toilets, my hands are flaking from washing dishes for extra money. It isn’t as if I’m freeloading.”

“I know you earned your place here.” Ben’s voice becomes stiff and guarded, bracing himself for a fight, the way he did when fighting with Leia. 

“I’m a good employee,” she says, crossing her arms. It’s as if she’s trying to convince herself of her own worth. “Your mother even told me if I stay long enough, I could work my way up the ladder. Take on a managerial position, even.”

Ben closes his eyes, for a moment trying to reconcile the mother he knew to Rey’s version of her. They were like two magnets, hovering over each other, prevented from coming together by some invisible shield. The Leia of his boyhood would never have been so generous. 

“That doesn’t sound like her,” Ben says. “She’s a shark.”

“You’re so unfair,” Rey snaps. “The way you talk about her is sick.”

Ben pinches his nose, his blood pressure beginning to climb. He mistakenly expects her to understand bad parents—what’s worse than abandoning your kid at a police station in London? But since her life was comprised of a series of bad guardians, she thinks she knows every definition of a bad parent. But she doesn’t know the burrowing sadness of a mother being the only one not to volunteer for school activities, or the confusion of seeing Uncle Luke sent in her place, and the eventual bitter acceptance that she would always be a no-show. It seems stupid, because he had a nice roof over his head and hot meals, but it’s a different kind of utter disappointment, the kind that lingers like a fine dust in the marrow of his bones. 

How could you explain that feeling to someone who was born in a prison cell—a story Ben can’t confirm the authenticity of—without sounding like an entitled rich boy? 

“My mother once fired a maid because she walked too loudly,” Ben tells her. A wariness washes across Rey’s eyes, and maybe she’s beginning to understand. “No one has any love for my mother. Least of all her employees.” 

Rey stabs an angry finger at him. “She wants to be part of your life again, Ben. You can call her once a week.”

“Do you know the last time my mother and I tried to talk to each other for an extended period of time? I was kicked out of summer class for refusing to call the camp counselor Peaches because I thought the entire concept of the counselors choosing summer fruit names was stupid. So they called my mom and she came to get me and it was just the two of us alone in the car all the way from Maine with nothing to talk about but my camp failure. Luckily, I had also mooned the swim team or even that subject would’ve gotten stale,” Ben says. 

“Memorize the middle of the Sunday paper. That’ll give you something to talk about,” Rey suggests coldly. He can feel her projecting onto him; her uncompromising attitude a hybrid mix of desperation and longing. “Bottling up all that hate will give you a stroke.”

“Look,” Ben sighs, “I don’t _hate_ her. She lived her life the way she thought she was supposed to. She followed the rules taught to her by her non-fishing, non-Barbie-buying dad. She’s worked hard. She bought a nice penthouse in New York City. She put money away for me. All she asked in return was for her son to want the same life that she had. What a disappointment it must have been for her to get me.”

Rey always had a hot heart for orphans, animals, and broken people. “You could never be a disappointment.”  


He thinks that’s the first time anyone has said it out loud. 

***

Rey lugs what seems like the hundredth trash bag filled with someone's junk inside Luke’s house. “Okay, did anyone in town keep anything?”

Rose smiles ruefully. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“I’m never being civic minded again. It was hot in that room and I was dehydrated. I wasn’t in my right mind,” Rey says.

“It’s for charity, it’s a good thing!” Rose reassures her. 

The walls are thin, and she can hear Luke pottering around trying to organize the chaos in some semblance of an orderly arrangement. Fishing poles clatter noisily to the ground as they fall, silverware clashes together when Luke bumps the boxes, a kitten clock purrs on the hour. They hear inaudible swearing, followed by half hearted requests for the Lord’s forgiveness. 

Rose is folding a blue jacket with rhinestones that catch in the light. Rey reaches out for it almost instantly. “Wait! That jacket is adorable.”

“I thought the point was to get rid of crap,” Rose chides, tossing it to Rey anyway. “Not to accumulate more.”

“But it has rhinestones.”

“Yes, it’ll go perfectly with your B52s shirt,” Rose snarks. “Please tell me you got rid of anything you’d be embarrassed to wear in car accident.”

“I’m not uprooting my whole closet!” Rey holds the jacket to her chest defensively. “I wear them as pajamas a lot.”

“But do you _need_ the Jimmy Buffett shirt?”

“Yes,” Rey answers immediately. “I’m keeping that one. You can donate my Bunny Ranch shirt.” 

Because Paige has even more questionable fashion taste than Rey, Rose says nothing more. Rey turns her face away before the old disco light can throw her blush into sharp relief. That night lives in her memories in her Top Five Stupidest Moments list. Ben, who usually studies her with an indecipherable gaze, had been horrified. It was then she realized that he was Leia’s son, and how stupid had she been to ask him for this favor? It was karma for taking advantage of his unfailing kindness towards her. 

The next day, she wore a lacy black thong. 

Rey shrugs on the jacket, and it fits like a glove. 

“Rey, sweetie, can you come here for a second?” Ahsoka Tano pokes her head in the door, beckoning Rey outside. 

There’s an enormous set of marching drums on the porch. 

“You know, Mrs. Ventress gave me three bags of potholders and begged me to take her grandson, but that wasn’t as weird as this,” Rey says. 

“I danced on these drums at the Copacabana in 1969. I wore bananas and everything,” Ahsoka tells her. “New jacket?”

“What?” Rey looks down at her newest find. “Oh, yeah. Isn’t it cute?”

“I’m not sure. I think I’m biased. I used to see it on the corner of the gas station on Bazine Netal, back when Ben was dating her.” Ahsoka shudders at the memory, and Rey has the urge to do the same. 

“I can’t picture him with a girlfriend for some reason,” Rey admits. Ben seemed to be the perpetual bachelor. Rey had never seen his apartment, but it was previously his father’s office on the second floor of the diner. She imagined dark furniture, dishes festering in the sink, sparse decor. 

Ben didn’t seem to have room for a girl in his life. 

“Well, he’s no Warren Beatty,” Ahsoka says. She lets it hang in the air for a moment, then amends herself. “Actually, he could’ve been. Girls always like him, he has this brooding quality that drives them nuts. It’s like moths to flame. But he’s a serial monogamist.”

Rey suddenly feels itchy in the studded jacket. “Huh. I always just pegged him as a lone wolf, I guess.”

“This was during his bad boy phase,” Ahsoka says. “He once staged a fake crime scene with chalk and police tape—and Luke fell for it. I think they tried to vote him out of town. He wasn’t always such a fixture here.” 

Rey wonders how her life would have been different if she had come here as a teenager. If her life didn’t revolve around the strict time-tables of work schedules, would she have gotten to know him? No matter how many years pass, Ben remains an enigma in her life. He doesn’t share much of his life with her, except on a few rare occasions. His mother was equally tight-lipped about it, but sometimes she slipped. 

Rey once had a rattling encounter with a Scroogelike guest, and it was all the more embarrassing because Leia was there to witness it. The matronly woman reached into her Louis Vuitton purse, pulled out a pack of Swedish Fish, and handed them to Rey. 

“When Ben was three, he was a fiend,” Leia told her. “He’d run around the hardware store naked with power drills. Han would carry this chubby baby across town and plop him in my arms. He’d try and wiggle away, saying Dada, come back. But I figured out if I gave him a Swedish Fish, he was content to chew on that for a while. Took him ages to finish the thing, but by that time he forgot Han left.” 

“Speak of the Devil.” Ahsoka jerks her head towards Ben, who’s trudging his way up the road wielding two full trash bags.

“Ahsoka,” Rey asks carefully. “When did Ben and Bazine, you know, end?”

“After graduation, maybe?” The old woman watches Ben, whose hair is falling artfully across his forehead. “The story is that she asked him to go with her to Vassar. She was free-spirited, like most of Ben’s girlfriends were. Opposites attract, I guess. But you know Ben; we’ll have to bury him in that diner.” 

Rey thinks about this, filching a leopard print cowboy hat from the ledge and covering her greasy hair. She thinks about Ben denying himself a college education when he was in the unique position to do whatever he wanted, debt free. She thinks about all the opportunities Ben has batted away, opportunities Rey could never dream of. Yet, she can’t ever find it in her to resent him for it. 

“I’ve got pots and clothes,” he tells Rey. 

“Finally, the world’s shortage of flannel will come to an end!” 

Ben pushes past her. She follows him into the house, almost disappointed he didn’t recognize Bazine’s jacket. 

“You’re talkative today.” 

He sets his junk in the kitchen, amidst strange clown figurines, kitten posters, and vintage clothes. He turns the full force of his bright, magnetic eyes on her. Most people can't stand it, choosing to stare at a point on his chest or at the floor, but Rey wasn't one to cow in the face of a man. That doesn't mean her cheeks don't blaze hot with blood. “I’m sorry. Wanna talk about french kissing and glitter eyeshadow: trashy or trendy?”

It’s only when she tears her eyes away from his that she sees it. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the camel! You _shaved.”_

His hand flies self-consciously to his naked chin, which lacks the dark beard that usually covers it. She notes that his chin is soft—it’s adorable in a Pillsbury Doughboy way. 

“Does it look bad?”

“No!” She bites her lip, but she really should be biting her tongue for answering so quickly. “It looks good. I mean, you always look good, but—well, you know what I mean.”

A smug expression crosses his face. She should have realized Ben wasn't immune to flattery, but somehow she was surprised. “I always look good?”

“Healthy!” Rey blurts. “Very robust, like an ox!”

He leans against the table, his eyes indecipherable. Rey could never get a read on him, but in this case she didn't have a word for the expression that lingered there. It didn't have the sharp edge of smugness. Though she found it was like being locked in the eyes of Kaa, so she changes the subject before he can purr in her ear and she tells him something much worse. “I found this jacket today. Ahsoka told me something very interesting about it.”

Ben frowns, appraising the jacket. But then he shrugs jerkily. “Was it J.Lo’s or something?”

“You’re amazingly unobservant,” Rey sighs. “Bazine Netal? Your ex-girlfriend?”

He inhales sharply, biting the inside of his cheek and nodding. “Oh. Yeah.”

“I can’t believe you dated a girl named Bazine,” she says. “Are you Hugh Hefner? Have another friend named Crystal?”

“That was a long time ago,” Ben deflects. “Ming Dynasty ancient.”

“What happened to her?” Rey sidles up beside him, his jeans abrasive against her bare thighs. “I’ve never seen her.”  


Ben shrugs again. His pouty lips are turned down in the corners with displeasure. “She’s one of those National Geographic photographers. She comes and goes.”

“Oh.” She traces the rim of a _F.R.I.E.N.D.S_ mug with her pinky, her foot settled against his. “You haven’t dated since?”

“I get no pleasure out of the prospect of dating,” Ben replies. His long lashes cast a dark shadow against his pale skin, starkly contrasted against his black hair. She can appreciate the fullness of his lips without the wispy hairs curling over it now. “I get hives, I get sweaty, I need to shower multiple times. And then I have to buy a Zagat so I don’t wind up in a restaurant that’s really just a front for a cocaine laundering ring. It’s too much work.”

“A real Lothario,” Rey says quietly. But she can’t help but break into a wide grin, nudging him with her elbow. He, too, fights a smile. “No one else has caught your eye?”

There’s a beat, and he says in a measured voice, “Not anyone from Stars Hollow.”

***

There had never been a rummage sale before, and that’s probably the underlying reason for maze of old, tattered things that line the streets. Vendors even came out for the event, Luke peddling cupcakes using ingenuous children, competing with Amilyn’s banana nut bread and the Andor’s churro stand. 

Luke put out themed cupcakes, four flavors for each season. Pumpkin for the fall, red velvet for winter, lemon meringue for spring, and orange creme for the summer. Of course, he paid Rose a pretty penny to have her bake all of this for him just so he could control the aesthetic of the event. 

Ben knows Rey adores pumpkin cupcakes. They’re coated in a thick cream cheese frosting and made with homemade pumpkin paste. One time, when Rey had a bad day, she came into the diner with a crestfallen face. _All the pumpkin muffins are gone,_ she sniffled. _Rose made her last batch for the fall, and everyone ate them. She has a big dinner to prepare for, and I can’t make her bake more just for me._

Ben had hiked out in the thick snowfall, early that year, to obtain the recipe from Rose. He wasn’t a baker, he had none of the mathematical affinity required for it, but he scrounged up a batch and watched it carefully in the oven while he forced Hux to keep her from leaving. The end result was less than perfect; Rose always presented even cupcakes with artfully frosted tops decorated with a maple flavored sugar leaf. Ben’s were wonky, misshapen with half melted frosting, but he presented it to her anyway. His hands were dirty, but she still hugged him, smelling of sweet citrus as she pressed a sweeter kiss to his scruffy cheek. 

He later made a joke about writing a check out to her dentist for all the cavities he was encouraging, but it was to hide the fervent excitement in his eyes. 

For old time’s sake, he purchased another pumpkin cupcake from an aggressive child Luke found from the elementary school. Ben keeps the cupcake in a small bag close to his chest, feeling self-conscious without his baseball hat. His hair is curling around his cheekbones, tickling his skin. He even shaved the stubble on his upper lip and chin, thinking of Rey’s slack jaw when she realized what he looked like without his beard. 

She looked so young that day with her schoolgirl braids. Then she started prying about Bazine, and he felt like a proper high schooler again playing MASH and sneakily writing down his crush twice under the ‘wife’ category. It never turned out the way he wanted, but that was just life. 

_Ben is gonna live in a shack with Paige Tico right here in Stars Hollow, and he’ll have twelve kids, drive a truck, and he’ll be a garbage man!_

He can still see the flush that crept up Paige’s neck as the other kids teased her about being an impoverished housewife with twelve kids, like the old woman who lived in a shoe. 

Then of course, Rey rubbed her legs against his thigh while fishing for information on his dating life, and he couldn’t possibly tell her how she made him feel. Seeing her in a jacket that he associated with blurry memories of groping as he pushed his tongue into another girl’s mouth—

He couldn’t articulate how it made him feel. And that was the problem. So he lied. 

“BEN SOLO!” 

Maz Kanata is beckoning him over to the table she’s manning. He spies a monkey lamp, a singing rabbi, and various Spice Girl memrobeilia. The artifacts just scream Rey. 

“Korri Sella is visiting her father this weekend,” she tells him. “She was asking for you.”

“Isn’t she supposed to be the up-and-coming Christiane Amanpour?” 

“Here, contribute to charity,” Maz says, pushing some sushi magnets into his hand. “I think her career is taking off, but I don’t have cable so I wouldn’t know.”

Ben wrinkles his nose, generously handing the small old woman a crumpled five. A crisp breeze rolls in from the south, rustling the newly blossomed trees. The rotten stink of the Callery pear trees that Luke insisted on planting in the square tickle their noses. 

“You don’t seem happy.”

He fingers a string of chunky scarlet beads on the table, jerking his shoulder. As he spares another glance to sweep his eyes over the crowded street, Maz’s eyes land on the pink cupcake bag clutched in his hand. 

“Is there a warrant out for your arrest?” Chewie jokes, his enormous frame blocking out the sun as he approaches.

“No, he wants to see Rey,” Maz says. “Don’t look at me like that, you. She’s wearing a very pretty outfit today. It brings out the green in her eyes. You like green eyes, don’t you Ben?”

He stumbles away, his ears ringing with their laughter. 

Then he stumbles right into Korri. They exchange pleasantries for a minute, but the great thing about her is she never was one for small talk—a side effect of dangerous overseas reporting, perhaps. 

He finds Rey at a table with too many clowns. Her hair is plaited down her back today, rather than tossed up in a haphazard bun. Maz was right about her shirt, which is spring green with a collared shirt underneath. He finds himself facing the same dilemma he always does, always helpless when faced with her stare. 

The cool green color fortunately doesn’t send a hot bush across his cheeks, the way animators like to overzealously redden the cheeks of their embarrassed illustrated characters, the way her flaming brown eyes do. 

“I like the new look,” Ben tells her, looking anywhere but at her face. “It’s very high class substitute teacher.” 

“Exactly what I was going for,” Rey replies curtly. She plucks the coiled fur of a stuffed poodle too harshly. “I saw you talking to Korri a few minutes ago.”

“You know her?” Ben mirrors Rey, picking at the frizzy hair of an old Troll doll. The gossamer rainbow material comes apart in his hands. 

“She’s a reporter. I see her on the news all the time,” Rey explains. “She’s very nice. I feel sort of weird telling you about this, but I saw you guys talking and it seemed kind of...private. And she mentioned earlier that you didn’t make her, you know, gag, so I just figured you guys were making some sort of plan to hang out. But I think it would be a little weird.”

Ben sets down the little doll before he can damage it beyond repair. The muscle beneath his eye jumps, a telltale sign of his forthcoming anger. 

“Look, I know I have no right to say anything. But it’s just—if you did date her, she’s really active and worldly, and we all know you grew roots and planted yourself in this town. I don’t know, I think it’s just not you. And you’d have to think about traveling, and who will run the diner, and I’ll be malnourished. Who else will try to sneak fruit in my food? So I think you should think about not dating her.” 

Ben keeps his eyes trained on the gauzy tablecloth, pushing the storm down. He trails his eyes across dusty books, _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Catcher in the Rye_ , mandatory school reading that reminds him of junior high fumblings, clumsy lips and rosary beads falling from uniform pockets. His eyes finally drift up to Rey’s tight lipped face, noting the dusky blush that’s burning across her cheekbones, connected across the bridge of her nose.

Who’s the animated character now? 

“Boy I tell you you’ve got nerve.”

“I know this is your private business—”

“It is my private business.”

Rey holds her chin high, maintaining the bald confidence of a person who believes they’re justified. “You don’t see any validity to my side at all?”

“I’m a grown man. You can’t tell me who to date,” he snaps. The vein in his temple is pulsing, threatening to spill his boiling blood out onto the street. 

“I’m not telling you who to date, I’m telling you who not to date,” she says gaily. 

“You can’t tell me that either. I’ll date who I like, and if that screws with your plans, then sorry. If you don’t like it then deal with it.”

“Fine! I just thought if something was going to affect our friendship in some way, you’d care about that,” she snaps, stomping her little foot. “Because if the situation was reversed, then I would care. But hey, that’s just me. So go ahead! Date her, marry her, make her Mrs. Backwards Baseball hat. See if I care!”

Even though she’s in charge of the table, she starts to storm off. Ben calls after her. 

“By the way, I wasn’t asking her out. Been there, done that actually. We dated in high school and broke up for the very reason you mentioned.” He watches with satisfaction as her cheeks turn so dark, they’re almost violet. “But I was however giving her directions on the quickest way back to Hartford. It was very romantic. I said you take a right at Deerfield, catch the I-5 and take it south. Hot stuff.”

For a moment, she’s stock still, her lips twitching. “That is so typical of you! That is not the fastest way back to Hartford. Everyone knows you take Main to Cherry to Linwood and then grab the I-11. Everyone knows that, except for you.” 

Ben watches her stomp away, an impish grin stretching across his face.


	5. 2002

It’s the end of the day when Rey enters the diner. The joint is empty, save for Ben wiping down the tables. 

“Hey,” she says, her voice soft. 

“Rey,” he says. 

“I have something for you.”

She brandishes a bag from behind her back, a rueful smile on her face. 

“Oh yeah?”

She nods. “An apology. For spilling grape juice on your red flannel.” 

He takes out the tissue paper and sees something that makes his heart jump a little: a blue baseball hat. 

“God forbid something happens to that one,” Rey says, gesturing to the red hat on his head. She takes the blue hat from him as he takes the red hat off. Her hand hovers over his head for a second, ducking in and out like she wants to smooth down his hair. But she just slides the blue hat over his head and smiles. 

“Thank you,” Ben says. He adjusts the hat self consciously under her scrutinizing gaze. 

“It looks good on you,” she decides. 

Ben can’t help it—he grins wolfishly. “Good how?”

Rey stares at him for another long moment, the air thrumming between them. He looks at her and looks at her, and he truly could melt into a puddle from the warmth of her autumn eyes burnishing. Blood swirls beneath her fleshy cheeks, melding into her freckles, complimenting the red taint of her lips. Her lashes are sooty and matted, fluttering at him through hazy eyes, and he thinks maybe—just maybe—she’s feeling something too. 

For a brief moment, he can picture her brushing dry lips over his in a droopy, sleepy movement in the soft hours of the morning. The daydreams have been getting worse lately, and he doesn’t know how to quell them or banish them. She snuck up on him, burrowed into his brain, and now he’s beginning to think if he doesn’t do something soon, he’ll be damned forever. 

All he knows is that he’s aching. He’s aflame, he’s trapped in an ardent haze, and he’s marvellously confused. 

“I’ll make some coffee,” he says. 

Whatever was there, it’s now broken. She blinks, he moves, and he wonders if she’s throbbing too. 

***

Ben is watching Star Trek—again. His blood is still sizzling like a snare and he’s wide eyed, barely paying attention to the comforting nostalgia of Patrick Stewart. He can hear the white noise of the television, the crack of popcorn kernels combusting in the microwave, the spurts of laughter from the street below the diner. But he was too aware of the poignant absence of Rey’s babbling and her lofty giggles. 

He feels so alone. Ben wasn’t sure why; maybe it was because he was staring at his father’s red hat in his hands, now replaced with Rey’s gift. It was so hollow to return to a dark, empty apartment after the suffocating tension downstairs. He’s independent, and he likes being alone most of the time. But some nights, like this quiet one, he really does wish for someone to come home to. 

His phone rings, and it’s almost too convenient. 

“Ben!” Rey’s breathy voice is on the other end. “Stella got out, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to cheep, or throw seeds down, or pull a Lucy Ricardo and act like a chicken.”

“Are you feverish?” 

“Could you please come over here and help me find her?”

Ben considers this. She’s asking him to come to her late at night, after a particularly heated moment downstairs that left his insides full of hot poison. She lives alone, she’s single...he’s single. Is it so wrong that he thinks she’s asking him over just to see him? 

“Yeah, sure,” he tells her. “I’ll be right over.”

“Hurry!”

Did she want to see him that bad? Is he supposed to bring a condom? He steels himself and starts to dial a number when he stops. He hangs up the phone slowly, his heart sinking. 

His father is dead. He can’t go to him for girl advice, and he never got to. Ben never really dated seriously, besides those few fumblings with Bazine Netal in the back of the Falcon. And he never asked his dad for help when he should’ve, because he had no idea what the female anatomy looked like or how to take a bra off, or even how to kiss with tongue. 

He drives the Falcon over to Rey’s, and he has a thunderous cloud above his head. He hates this car. He hates the stupid bench in the back filled with wrappers and empty cans that his father left behind. He hates the stupid tubes of lipstick and hand lotion left behind by his mother. And most of all, he hates the brown blood stain on the driver’s seat that would never let him forget what happened in here. 

It’s a good thing he gets to see Rey, because he needs her right now more than he cares to admit. 

Rey is breathing heavily, sweating as she grabs him by the collar with a feverish look in her eye. “Thank God. Get in here.”

She tugs him to her, their noses bumping and limbs tangling. Their breath mingles—hers tastes like Chinese food, which he sees the empty containers of tossed carelessly on the ground. In fact, the whole shed is a disaster. The entire place is in disarray, and between her husky voice over the phone and her needy body language, his mind is going to bad places. 

He thinks there was a porn Mitaka showed him when they were teenagers that started like this. 

“What’s going on?”

She grasps his hand in hers, and he can’t pretend it doesn’t feel nice to be shown physical affection. “The first sighting was here, over by the Cosmo magazine. She sort of burrowed under the _Glamor_ and knocked over a bottle of nail polish, so all I can tell you is this chick is definitely a girl.”

Ben crosses his arm and nods, smiling to himself. Was this one of her bits? She had a lot of bits.

“Rey…” he squeezes her hand. She might be at this for an hour before she gave it up. But she looks at him with wild eyes, and when she sees the probably amorous look on his face, she cocks her head. 

But then he hears a little chirping noise. “What was that?”

She points near the futon. “Stella! There she is!”

Ben drops her hand as if she’s burned him. “There really is a chick loose in here?”

“Yeah! I told you,” she says. Then she frowns. “What did you think I called you...over for?”

He blanches. “Oh, well you know. The chick—oh, there she is!”

They race around the potting shed for half an hour with a flashlight trying to catch poor little Stella, and he finally succeeds. 

“You’re a genius,” Rey tells him. Her skin is glistening with sweat, they’re both panting, and he realizes that all she’s wearing is a large t-shirt that skims the tops of her thighs. His eyes roam over the milky white flesh before he can help himself, his tongue darting out to wet his lips on impulse. 

He sees her throat bob as she swallows hard. 

“It was nothing.”

She raises her arms up over her head and stretches, her shoulders cracking, exposing all of her thighs to him and just the very edge of her—he nearly chokes— _red_ panties. 

He’s in a state of such vulnerable melancholy right now he doesn’t even try to push away the idea of hauling her up against his chest, cupping her backside as the peaks of her nipples drag against his flannel and kissing her red mouth. 

Ben notices that Rey is playing coy. She’s risen on the balls of her feet to get a better look at him, balancing on the edge of the futon and biting her lip invitingly. He leans forward without realizing, their breath mingling again. 

He can list the things he’d do to her, checking them off in his mind like a grocery list. Feeling bold, drugged almost, he runs a hand up her bare arm. The hairs on her skin stand up straight, electrified. She hums contentedly, faintly smiling down at his fingers tickling her. His hand drifts down to her hip, lingering along the hem of her shirt. All the while, they’ve leaned in closer, their noses bumping. Her toes drag along his feet, one digit at a time, the sensation magnified in a prolonged moment. And then—

She blinks. What he thought was there disappears, her face painted over with something akin to shock. How had she let him get this far, she was probably thinking. The trance he was in is cruelly torn from his eyes and he sees this for what it is: a mistake. He, too, rips himself away from her. 

“I’ve got things to do,” he lies. “I should get back.”

“Right!” Rey squeaks. “Cool. I’ve got a _Godfather_ marathon to get back to.” 

He doesn’t know what he says in reply, he only remembers stumbling out of there before she can notice the tent in his pants. And he’s back in the dim office space he calls a house, lying wide awake in bed with an ache in his heart, his father and Rey’s faces mingling in his thoughts as an unwanted tear rolls up his temple. 

***

Rose is making egg white omelets the next morning when Rey returns Stella.  


“It was lucky Ben caught her,” Rey says. “She was intelligent.”  


“Ben is a gem,” Rose agrees. “Finn would have probably broken up with me if anything happened to that baby. He has this weird theory about her. She’s supposed to lay the county’s biggest eggs or something.”  


Rey laughs, taking a sip of her coffee. Rose is an amazing chef, and when she uses Finn’s vegetables, it’s an unbeatable combination. But the casual and almost lazy way Ben makes his coffee somehow is just better than Rose’s fancy French kind.  


“He was so confused about Stella,” she remembers. “He acted like I made up the story about the chick.”  


“Well,” Rose says. “Calling a guy and telling him to help you find your loose chick sound a little…”  


“A little what?” Rey demands, stiffening.  


“I mean, it sounds like code for ‘I’m not wearing any underwear.’”  


“Rose!”  


“Listen,” she says. “When Finn and I first...you know, I called him and asked him to help me fix my washing machine. He doesn’t know how to fix a washing machine, and it wasn’t even broken. But we both pretended to look for the problem, and then we had a bottle of wine, and then…  


Rey laughs with disbelief. “No way! Ben doesn’t—he isn’t...no! It’s Ben.”  


Rose shoots her a dubious look. “But you called him. Out of everyone in town, you called Ben. You’re single and alone, and so is he, it was late at night. What was he supposed to think?”  


Rey shifts uncomfortably, recalling that inscrutable look on his face, the easy smile he wore when she pulled him through the door, the visible gulp he took when she exposed her thighs to him out of a sheer vain desire to see him react.  


“It was purely a timing thing!” Rey defends. “I was just with him, he was on my mind! I just gave him a hat and I was thinking about him and the hat!”  


“The hat you gave Ben out of the goodness of your heart,” Rose teases. “I don’t see you giving Armie Hux any baseball hats.”  


“So if I gave Armie a hat, I want to get him in bed with me? I gave Mitaka a pen the other day, does that mean I want him too? I’m just trying to get any unsuspecting male in bed with me? Am I Michael Douglas?”  


“Rey…”  


“Thanks for the eggs,” Rey says, dropping her plate in the sink. “I gotta get back to work. I have a gnarly bathroom in room five waiting for me.”  


“Oh, honey, don’t be mad!” Rose calls.  


But Rey’s already speeding out the door, her heart racing.

***

If there’s one thing Ben misses about the city, it’s the lack of uncles who force him to attend town meetings. Meetings about deer eating Luke’s vegetable garden, birds shitting on fences, and hay bale mazes taking up most of the Fall Festival budget.

Rey brings snacks. Sometimes she sits next to him, like today, and she’s eating a hot dog and slurping on soda. She loves these meetings, maybe because living in the town feels like having a large, nosy extended family all in one room. 

“No one is listening to me,” Luke complains, slamming his gavel down. As the town selectman, he runs town meetings and everyone comes to him for their problems. It gives him the air of self importance. Sometimes, Ben thinks that’s why he tried to control him as a teenager. There were three months when his father gave up trying to fix Ben’s rebellious ways, and he knew punting him to Luke’s grocery store, with his uber religious demeanor and strict rules would have him begging for Han again. He remembers Luke would make him carry people’s grocery bags and shut the TV off after thirty minutes.

He saw the error of his ways after living with Luke. And it wasn’t something he ever wanted to repeat. 

“Oh, Luke, calm down,” Maz Kanata says. 

“I can’t calm down. I’m being persecuted.”

“I promise that we hear you.”

“We’ve been hearing you for twenty minutes,” Cassian Andor says. 

“Well excuse me, Cassian, some of us run businesses that don’t involve peddling drug paraphernalia to kids,” Luke snaps. 

“It was a lava lamp.”

“There is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs.”

Rey offers Ben some of her hot dog, which he declines. “Luke gets very angry for a devout Catholic.”

“There was nothing in the ten commandments about ‘thou shall not get mad,’” Ben points out.

“I’m going to Manhattan this weekend,” Rey says, bouncing excitedly. “I can finally buy some good clothes.”

“What are you talking about, you have plenty of clothes,” Ben says. 

“Yeah, t-shirts,” Rey says. “I have nothing stylish.”

“What are you talking about? You have the black cashmere coat and those knee high boots,” Ben reminds her. “And the pretty blue coat.”

“Those are the equivalent of Good Will finds,” Rey says. “I want some of my own. Oh, sweaters! I need sweaters.”

“You have the purple one, the red one, that nice green one,” Ben lists. “And you’ve got a ton of black ones, all of which go with both the powder blue coat. You have a dozen scarves, some silk and some knit, all of which you can mix and match with any of those sweater-coat combinations.”

Rey clenches her teeth. “Let me shop for some clothes.”

He relents, laughing quietly. 

“I’m sorry Luke, but when you talk I just can’t help but think of my grocery list,” Ahsoka is saying. “Croutons! That’s what I forgot.”

“So why are you shopping in Manhattan?” Ben whispers. 

“Okay don’t tell, but Finn is looking for wedding rings in the city,” Rey confides. “Since there’s nothing here but dead old ladies jewelry from pawn shops. And I’m being a consultant, plus I need outfits for when I start school.”

“Ah, right.” Rey is going to business classes at a local college in a week. “Is that going to help you become a manager?”

“I think so,” Rey says nervously. “I’ve been bookkeeping for your mother, since I’m good at math. I think she’s sort of impressed. And I think I’ve been a pretty good concierge, right?”

“Of course,” Ben assures her. Rey was promoted from scrubbing toilets all on her own. It’s what she deserves. 

“Ben, could you pretty please do me a favor?” Rey asks, clasping her hands and pouting. 

He sighs heavily. “What?”

“Could you please talk to your mother about me? I have to know if I stand a chance,” Rey says quickly. “Before you say no, listen: do you want me to spend my life behind the counter at Dunkin Donuts? Because that’s where I could be headed, selling chocolate donuts to people in business suits, bitter and resentful because that should have been me. Because if your mother isn’t considering and then I indebt myself for nothing, I’ll have no choice but to take a menial job! Who else is going to hire me? I have no marketable qualities besides my self-taught engineering, toilet scrubbing, and the decidedly mediocre sewing skills I’ve accumulated over the past four years that Maz is very disappointed with. Is that what you want for me, Ben?” 

“Okay.”

Rey blinks. “Huh?”

He shrugs. “I’ll call her later.”

“Just like that?” She looks like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Ben nods. “Yep.”

“Oh.” She sits back, eyeing him dubiously. “Well, thanks.”

The meeting is adjourned then, because apparently no one is listening to Luke and it’s giving him an asthma attack. 

“Have fun in Manhattan,” Ben says, departing. 

He doesn’t want her to see the way his hands shake at the prospect of calling his mother. 

 

***

“Mother.” 

Ben holds the phone with white knuckled grip, the sound of Leia’s voice making him squirm like nails on a chalkboard. 

“Hello? Who is this?”

“What I find strange about this encounter already is that you can remember every gift you’ve ever given everyone down to the last shrimp fork, but you can’t even recall what your own son’s voice sounds like.”

“Ben?” His mother pauses, probably collecting herself. Then she sniffs, “How was I supposed to know that was you? You haven’t called once since Han...you know.”

“My voice hasn’t changed.”

“Well, now that you mention it. It’s very unique. Remember that one year you did that play? _The New York Times_ called you ‘winningly naive.’” 

“You didn’t show up, so.”

Leia sighs massively. “I assume you called for a reason?”

“Yes, actually,” Ben says. “By my recollection, you’ve never been able to keep a maid. Maids from countries with dictatorships and death squads couldn’t survive your wrath. But you kept my friend Rey.”

“Rey?” Leia’s voice is sharp, dagger-like. “That girl at the Dragonfly?”

“Yes. Tall for a woman, short chestnut hair?”

“Chestnut? Did you swallow a thesaurus?”

“Mother.”

“What about the girl?”

“You kept her,” Ben says. “Obviously you like her. She really likes working for you, so you better intend on keeping her around and promoting her. Because if you just string her along for years only to drop her, or keep her stuck in the same low paying position, I’ll come up there myself.”

After a beat, his mother says, “Luke never mentioned you were pussy whipped. I’m having words with him.”

“Mother.”

“Christ, Ben. You’re threatening to come up here and show me what you’re made of if I slight the girl, and I’m supposed to think this is platonic?”

“This isn’t about me. This is about an employee of yours who is a good friend of mine that I care about. I don’t want you to hurt her like you hurt me.”

The phone crackles as Leia sighs. “Can you just email me all of the insults you plan on flinging at me? I’m a very busy woman.”

“Oh, don’t I know,” Ben says, nostrils flaring. 

“Would it have made you feel better if I put you on my knee and burped you and bought you a pony?” Leia snaps. “I provided for you. I gave you a home. I threw you grand birthday parties that cost a fortune—”

“Yet you had a Guatemalan nanny take care of me when I had the flu.”

“I’m not a shaman, Ben.”

“I’m tired of this conversation,” Ben huffs. 

“If I had a nickel for every time you stormed away from a fight,” Leia mutters. 

“Then you could pay for one of those lavish parties.”

They both breath heavily over the phone for a minute, too keyed up to say anything. Ben feels the familiar urge to punch a hole in the wall, an instinct he thought was long fossilized.

“I didn’t need a party,” Ben says quietly. “What I needed was for you to act like you gave a damn.”

He can hear his mother breathing on the other end, and he finds himself wishing she would just say ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s all he wants to hear. 

But he doesn’t get that. Instead, she says, “I did. Just not in the way you wanted me to.”

Ben shakes his head. He never expects a lot from his mother beyond a check at every holiday. He sees that loopy signature, Leia Organa, and remembers how fast she threw away his father’s last name like it was week old Chinese food. She’s never forced him to come back to her, like he knew she could have in one of those ugly custody battles. But he thinks maybe it would have been nice if she fought for him just once. 

But she always just pushes him away. 

“I’m not going to fire Rey,” she says. “And I do plan to make her manager one day. Even if you hadn’t called on her behalf.”

_Click._

***

 

Rey sits at a coffee shop after class, thinking that Ben’s coffee is somehow the best coffee she’s had. And she’s sampled a lot of coffee. She ordered some of that special New Orleans coffee, thinking it would be exotic, but it wasn’t really. There’s something homey about Ben’s brew that she likes. 

“Hey.” She turns to see a man who frequents this coffee shop around the same time giving her a friendly smile. 

“Poe, hi! What are you drinking?”

“Plain coffee,” Poe says. “I wanted some cream, but that prompted a very elaborate foam conversation.”

Rey laughs quietly, fiddling with her to-go cup. Poe was an English teacher at a very prestigious preparatory school in Hartford, and his name was so laughably fitting she poked fun at it the first few weeks she ran into him here. 

Poe slides into the seat beside her. “I’ve been running into you twice a week for the last, oh, four weeks would you say?”

She nods slowly, wondering where he’s going with this trail of thought. 

“I’m going to cut the cute: I think we should date.”

Rey blinks, furrowing her brow. “Why?”

“I think we both want to.”

She chokes on a laugh. “Well I want to be in the Bangles, but that doesn’t mean I should buy a guitar, quit my job and ruin my life.”

“We’re both clearly attracted to each other,” Poe continues, undeterred. 

“I’m attracted to pie, but I don’t want to date pie,” Rey says. 

“I have a gut feeling about you,” he says. 

Rey studies him. He’s attractive, yes. She may or may not have flirted with him a few times. He has very dark curly hair and a nice, crinkly smile. He has a good career, and maybe he’s too smart for her, but he isn’t snooty. 

“Why not,” Rey relents. “Does Friday work for you?”

On the bus back to town, she thinks of how excited Finn and Rose will be when she tells them. Ahsoka will tell her lots of anecdotes about her days as a showgirl and navigating the men in those times, and Luke always told her that when she scored a date, she should come to him to borrow a cross necklace to ward off any “bad behavior” on the man’s end. 

But for some reason, she gets a knot in her throat at the thought of telling Ben. 

***

“Is that meatloaf?” 

Ben looks at Rose, who just put down a plate of crab puffs next to his homemade dinner. 

He nods. “Uh huh.”

“You use ketchup?” Rose wrinkles her nose. 

“You wanna make fun of my father too?” 

Rose pinks. “Sorry. You know my spanakopita would compliment it! Can I make a pretty design?”

Finn narrows his eyes at Ben from the wall, and he knows he has no choice but to let her arrange the little triangles of spinach pie around his meatloaf, which he doesn’t think is complimentary at all. 

Ben has to make his exit when Chewie starts playing the piano and Maz cries, “Oh! This was Cinnamon’s song!”

He really hates this town. He’s in a house that’s prejudiced against his six three frame, as he learns when he keeps knocking his head into the door frames and lighting fixtures. There are pictures of an ugly orange cat everywhere, and his uncle is having a loud discussion with Mrs. Tico about Catholicism versus Seventh Day Adventists. 

Ben retreats into the kitchen, letting out a little ‘Oh’ when he sees Rey fumbling with a bunch of pill bottles. She grins sheepishly at him, but he can’t stop sweeping his eyes over her. She’s in a tight red dress and black stockings, her legs elongated by a pair of sharp heels. Her hair is twisted in a formal chignon, and Ben realizes he’s never seen her so cleaned up.

It takes his breath away. 

“It’s like Valley of the Dolls in here,” Rey laughs. “These were all for Cinnamon! Look, heartworm, rashes, thyroid. I’m surprised he didn’t drop dead sooner.”

Ben walks slowly up to her, his hands shoved in his pockets. His heart is racing as if he ran six miles to her. He doesn’t say anything for a moment in case it comes out breathless. 

“Maz thinks her marriage to Chewie is going to go belly up,” Ben says. “She watched something on Oprah about couples who lost a child.”

Rey laughs, her cheeks dimpled. “She’s just scared,” she says. “You know, you start to worry that maybe no one will ever want you. And in Maz’s case, maybe Chewie is the only person she could ever see wanting her.”

Ben leans over the counter, idly examining an orange pill bottle. “You’re scared about that?”

“Of course!” She self-consciously smooths her dress. “I never thought a man would ever want me.”

He scoffs, unthinkingly blurting, “Oh, please, with that ass?”

Ben straightens, contrite, smacking his head on the open cabinet as he starts to sputter his apologies. “I didn’t mean it—ouch, shit!—that was a stupid thing to say.” 

But Rey is laughing in earnest, reaching out to bend his neck down. She runs her fingers along where he hit his head, feeling for a bump. “I mean I never thought a man would want me for me. Annoying neurosis and all.”

Her voice is soft, her fingers massaging his scalp and tangling in his hair. His face is level with hers now that he’s bent over, and there’s such a childlike vulnerability in her eyes, he wants to embrace her in a hug and never let go. To make her feel wanted, to show that he would never abandon her like her good-for-nothing parents. 

“You’ll find him.” His voice is a whisper, and he realizes that this could be his moment. Ever since that night with the chick, his affection for her has become unbearable. Maybe it's been years in the making, but he feels the words on the tip of his tongue. Her expression is encouraging, for once she doesn't pull away, or babble, or make him feel like he's misinterpreting her somehow. Their faces are just inches apart. He could do it. Lean in, just brush his lips against hers for the briefest moment. Maybe she would tilt her face up to meet him, tug at his hair, run her tongue along his lip. He could whisper the words against her skin.

“Rey?” 

She springs apart from him, wiping her hands on her dress as though she’s wiping off his essence. 

“P-poe. This is my friend, Ben. He keeps me fed.”

A young, conventionally attractive man reaches out to shake his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Ben mumbles his greeting, blinded by the pain of his shattering heart. 

“Did you want me to make you a plate? Someone made some killer meatloaf,” he asks Rey.

She smiles brightly. “Yeah. That would be great, thanks.”

Poe leaves, throwing a dubious look back at Ben. 

“We were supposed to go on a date tonight,” Rey explains. “But Cinnamon, you know, dropped dead. I told him we could reschedule, but he insisted on coming to the wake. It’s sort of sweet, if you subtract the tragic loss.”

Ben nods, but he feels that cavity in his chest tearing itself open again like a long-clawed monster. He was supposed to be the one giving Rey meatloaf, since he made it with her in mind. 

“I should go stop my uncle before him and Mrs. Tico start World War III,” Ben says, jerking his thumb at the screaming match behind him. Rey’s brow furrows, but she nods wordlessly. 

The rest of his night is sour upon the realization that the love of his life is seeing a man who isn’t him, and he had all the chances in the world to be with her, but was too stupid to do anything about it. 

 

***

“He must really like you,” Finn says. Rey looks up from where she’s wiping her damp hands off on a dish rag. “He always looks at you like you’re going to give him a lap dance.”

“Finn!” Rey turns bright red. “I can’t think about Ben like that.”

“In a sexual way?”

“In...any way,” she settles on. 

Finn rolls his eyes. “Okay, you tell yourself that. But you like that he looks at you like a steak.”

She feels a blush creeping up her neck and blooming across her cheeks, blazing. 

“You’ll have to keep him away from Mustang Man. They’ll probably duel for your hand.”

“Finn,” Rey says sharply. “This is Ben we’re talking about. The man who gives me coffee and pie. He’s not dueling for anything.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Finn says. “Don’t pretend Ben doesn’t mean something to you. You’re not doing him any favors.”

Rey is properly chastened. She bites her lip and hangs her head. “He’s...important to me. More than he knows. But I’m technically on a date with Poe right now.”

Finn starts to fake gag. “Oh, jeez, Poe? Did his parents hate him?”

“You might want to find a toilet, because he happens to be an English teacher at a very rich school.”

He laughs loudly. “Yikes. No wonder he can afford such a nice car.”

“It is really nice,” Rey says, staring out the window at it wistfully. There’s a gaggle of people around it, including Armie and Kaydel. “Too nice. I think I’m in over my head.”

Finn squeezes her shoulder. “If he makes you happy, that’s all that matters. And you’ll call me and Rose and tell us how he is in the sack.”

Rey bursts out laughing, grateful for her friend. But the feeling grows bitter in her stomach when she starts to wonder why she isn’t more excited to be on a date with Poe. She tells herself it’s because she’s at a wake and it’s not supposed to be happy. 

She spies Ben peeling Luke away from an argument. He’s wearing a nice suit, a blue button up, but she spies her blue baseball hat shoved in the back pocket. His hair had been the softest thing she’d ever felt. 

They make eye contact, and she hates the doleful expression she sees there, hoping it isn’t a reflection of her own. 

***

“Where’s rest of the donkey? Why do I only have half a donkey?”

Ben hadn’t planned to spend his Saturday morning digging through an old Christmas trunk listening to Ahsoka yell at her actors for the pageant, but here he was. He finds the baby Jesus with a missing arm, and he groans internally because he knows Luke will absolutely lose his mind. 

He perks up when he sees Rey getting fitted for her Mary costume. Her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep and she’s yawning hugely. Ben stands up to go talk to her when Luke’s giant face blocks his objective. 

“The baby Jesus is missing an arm again? Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Luke stresses. “Everyone! Jesus is missing a limb, I repeat, Jesus is missing a limb.”

Rey peeks over at him, giggling when she catches Ben’s eye. Crazy, she mouths, drawing a deep laugh from him. 

Luke is frowning. “Come on, Uncle Luke. Why can’t we just buy a new baby Jesus? Preferably one that’s a boy.”

“This has been the Jesus since 1964. Have you been around since 1964?” His uncle crosses his arm and waits. Ben is still eyeing Rey, who’s smiling, but she flinches when Hux bumps into her and causes Maz to stick Rey’s skin with a needle. 

“I find it disturbing that you still don’t know my birthday,” Ben says. 

“Find the arm,” Luke snaps. 

Ben rolls his eyes and then weaves his way over to Rey. “Hey, Mary.”

She always has a special smile for him, one he selfishly feels is reserved for him. “They called me that in high school.”

“Mary?”

“Yes, I was virgin pure,” she says, fluttering her lashes. “When I lived with Plutt I went to this really seedy school. Virginity was really self-defense.”

“From crabs?”

“Precisely.” 

His good mood falters when he sees Poe at the other end of the room, getting fitted for a costume. “He’s in the pageant?”

Rey glances at her boyfriend. “Oh, uh, yeah. Luke thought Poe looked like a ‘historically accurate’ Joseph, but if that’s his logic then I certainly am not in keeping with that theme.”

Fucking Luke. 

“You’re more like the Olivia Hussey version,” Ben says. 

“She was gorgeous,” Rey says. “Her eyes are incredible.”

Ben looks into Rey’s eyes and nods, transfixed. “I know what you mean.”

She swallows hard and stares back at him, her eyes wide and lips parted. But she breaks her gaze when Poe sidles up to them. 

“This small town stuff is something else,” he says, grinning. “I’ve never been involved in a town function before.”

“You’re not supposed to be,” Ben snaps. Rey looks at him sharply, but Maz is smirking. “It’s for people who live in town.”

Poe’s smile fades, replaced with a confused grimace. “Yeah, I know. I’m just as surprised as you are.”

“No, no, I get it. My uncle makes stupid decisions sometimes.”

“Ben,” Rey hisses. 

“There are some people in town who were really gunning for that part. And you just waltzed in and took it from them,” Ben continues. “I can’t help but think that’s unfair.”

Rey crosses her arms. “And who, pray tell, was gunning to be Joseph? I don’t recall seeing anyone throwing a fit. Except for you.”

“Hux,” Ben lies. “He was really torn up over it.”

“Armie is playing Jesus. I think he’s pleased,” Rey snaps. 

“Yeah, well,” Ben combs through a list of pathetic lies. “Maybe I wanted the part.”

It’s not a total lie. If he had known his uncle would cast Poe, Ben would have thrown himself at the role just to be fake married to Rey for a few minutes. 

What the hell was happening to him?

Rey laughs disbelievingly. “You really want a part? Hey, Luke, Ben wants to be in the pageant.”

Ben is about to curse her when his uncle turns around, gives him a once-over, and wrinkles his nose. “We don’t have any parts for lumberjacks.”

Poe laughs nervously, but Rey is still fuming. She hikes up her skirt and pushes past Ben, leaving Poe to trail after her helplessly. 

Maz clucks her tongue. “That’s not how you get the girl, Ben,” she says. “Be patient. And respectful. She’ll remember that.”

He looks wistfully at her retreating figure and the idiot chasing her. Ben doesn’t know if he’s any good at waiting.


	6. 2003

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the forbidden smooch

There’s only one person who can inspire a thunderous degree of storminess from Ben, and she comes in a tantalizing freckled package. He feels sixteen again, trapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, hoping the world would burn. He’s haunted by the hollowness Rey left him with. 

Once the anger had ebbed during the Christmas Pageant, he was left only with his own brooding understanding of the world. She stubbornly refuses to come into the diner, at first attempting to send children in with money to order her a coffee and a cherry danish while she anxiously cowered outside before giving up completely. 

It only made him frighteningly angry. 

He misses her wildfire eyes, her reticent flirtation, her zest for life. Once she’s gone, he realizes that she feels better than his alone. 

Often, he lies awake at night replaying their volcanic argument that night. How she pleaded with him, her lips tightened in disapproval, her green eyes—the eyes he so likened to underwater gems—drowning in tears. 

“I really like him, Ben,” she told him, her voice thick. “I can't help it. And it's been a really long time since I've felt like this. You can't always control who you're attracted to, you know? I think the whole Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton thing really proves that. I don’t need you messing it up.”

His face was impassive, his thick arms crossed over his chest defensively—because even though she was eight inches shorter than him, one cold look from her could sting like a whip on the bare flesh of his back. He had brushed past her and pretended that it didn’t _hurt._

It wasn’t fair that she was allowed breach his defenses and drag him, headlong, down the path of falling in love with her, only to remove herself after one fight. 

Tonight, he can’t shut himself inside. In preparation, he lets Mitaka and Paige run the diner for the day, choosing to wallow on the couch and watch a _Sex and the City_ marathon. 

Ben detests parties, but for Kaydel’s baby shower he does the proper thing and puts on a white button down, pares down his beard, and even slaps on some expensive cologne. There’s a knot in his stomach, suppressing his appetite and sending a wave of dread over him. Parties were only fun with Rey, standing in the corner with her and laughing until they were in stitches, cramps blooming at their sides. 

She’ll be parading her boyfriend around tonight, he suspects. And he’ll have to avert his gaze and live with the knowledge that Poe was the one she said yes to, and that she might never say yes to him. That there might one day be another Poe. 

Ben grabs the neatly wrapped set of bibs and pacifiers for Kaydel’s unborn twins, and walks to Ahsoka’s studio for the shower. It’s a typically dysfunctional Stars Hollow event. The banner was originally, ‘It’s a Boy’ but someone tacked on a sloppy ‘s’ at the end. Someone thought it would be genius to photoshop Kaydel and her baby daddy’s faces together to see what the twins would look like. Because genetics were so predictable. And the mother-to-be, who was swollen and ready to pop, was tucked into her bed which had been dragged all the way to the studio. 

He finds himself folded into a small chair at the onesie-painting station with Jyn and Maz. Ahsoka is hovering over them, critiquing their work. 

“I think Snap is the one to beat,” she tells them, holding up Snap’s uncanny rendering of David Bowie. 

“I need another one,” Ben says, reaching for a clean white onesie. 

“No!” Maz slaps his hand away. “One per person.”

“But my truck looks like shit!”

“Just turn it into something else!” Maz orders. “I tried to draw Snoopy, but it’s looking more like a chocolate chip cookie. A big one. And what kid doesn’t like a cookie?”

“What am I supposed to turn this into?” Ben holds up his red and yellow monstrosity. It looked more like a fire than a firetruck. He thought one of The Cure’s album covers looked like it, actually, but he’s not trying to foster a baby Peter O’Toole.

“I don’t know. A blob?”

Ahsoka straightens suddenly. “Rey, honey. How are you doing?”

Ben stiffens, his head jerking subtly to the side. His fingers fumble with the snaps on the onesie, clasping and unclasping them idly. 

“I'm great!”

Ahsoka lowers her gravelly voice, though she angles her body to include Jyn, Maz, and Ben. “I mean about Poe? After the whole knitathon thing?”

There's a pregnant pause, a collective lean forward—or in Ben’s case, a head jerk—as Rey fidgets nervously. 

“Oh, you know. Moving forward,” she says. Ben has been admittedly out of the loop, and he can’t understand what happened at the knitathon—arguably the least dramatic kind of Stars Hollow production—and why she hangs her head with obvious embarrassment. 

“Did you ever finish Ben’s sweater?” Maz asks pointedly. 

“Um, well since it ended so early...no, I haven’t had the chance. I thought I’d have the full twelve hours, but obviously not.”

Ben can’t help but turn, slowly, looking into her ember eyes for the first time in two months. A dusky blush stains the tops of her cheekbones, and his own gaze settles on the brilliant curve of a trembling lip. 

“It was a nice square you knitted,” Maz assures her. “You were right about the green. I think it would look nice against his black hair.”

Rey lets out an embarrassed huff. “At least the Muddy Bridge is saved.”

“We’re still talking about this?” 

Everyone at the table blanches as Poe approaches. He walks with an imperial air about him remnant of an archaic era where a patriarchal alpha male was arranged to marry someone below his rank. It didn’t help that his wardrobe reminded Ben of the English Schoolboy manner in which Leia had dressed him as a boy. 

“Should I feel bad about donating thousands of dollars to save your little bridge?” Poe asks, condescending, the way Ben always pictured. The Muddy Bridge fundraiser was a long, ongoing process that seemed to be a running joke in the town. No matter how many fundraisers Luke hosted, there just wasn’t enough money to save that bridge. 

And now Ben understood why Rey would be upset. Poe had been the one to break a town tradition, which she held sacred. 

“You shouldn’t,” Rey says tightly. 

“I thought the point was to save the bridge!” 

Rey crosses her arms, the irritation from her palpable. “The point was to save it with knitting.”

Poe shakes his head. “That makes no sense.”

“You don’t need to try so hard to get everyone to like you,” Rey snaps. “We all know you were just showing off how much money you could bestow on us poor townsfolk.” 

Poe lets out a disbelieving laugh. “You’re the one making me try so hard. Bird watching, assistant managing a Peewee baseball team, a baby shower? I don’t even like kids! They’re always sticky, you know, like they’ve got jam on their hands. Even if there’s no jam, somehow they’ve always got jam on their hands. I have no patience for jam hands.”

An aura of fierce determination washes visibly over Rey. “You’re not mature enough to handle little kids! Your favorite band is The Offspring”

“So? You’re into Metallica.”

“Metallica is more substantial than The Offspring! They have one chord progression that they use over and over again that they just pop on new words and call it a single! And I’m not talking about this anymore!”

Ben hides a tremendous laugh behind his hand as she stomps her foot and retreats, leaving Poe with whiplash. Everyone glares at Poe accusingly, and under the pressure, he leaves the party entirely. 

“He’s no good for her,” Maz says. “He’s too…”

“Upper echelon?” offers Jyn. 

“Yeah. He reminds me of Leia,” Maz says. 

Ben shudders; he knows just how well an affluent character with high expectations fits into a town like Stars Hollow. He can see how Han and Leia were like a predecessor to Rey and Poe, and for once it gives Ben small comfort to know that they hadn’t worked out. 

“I’m gonna…” he jerks his finger in Rey’s direction. 

“Here!” Jyn throws a piece of cloth at him. He holds up the white square with cherry embroidery, frowning. 

“What am I supposed to do with this?” 

“It’s a handkerchief, you neanderthal. Offer it if she cries.”

Rey is standing in front of the photoshopped cardboard cutout of Kaydel and Gareth’s babies. Her arms are wrapped around her chest as if she’s trying to hold herself together, but she tries to hold in her tears. Ben stands beside her silently for a moment, hands shoved deep in his pockets. 

“That baby is homely,” he says, pointing to the first of the twins. “He’s got Gareth’s giant ears and Kaydel’s tiny mouth.”

Rey lets out a watery laugh, dabbing her runny eyes. “He’ll probably be a genius. The other one will get the girls.”

Ben doesn’t look at her, choosing to leave her some dignity, but he does nudge her lightly with his hip. 

“I’m not very good at dating,” she tells him. “I don’t have it down. I’ve never even really liked it. It’s too much…’what if.’ With Poe, it’s been the first time I’ve felt like hey, maybe I found someone who could be there for me. Give me some stability, you know? But now I’m not so sure.” 

Ben procures Jyn’s handkerchief from his clenched fist and hands it wordlessly to Rey. She smiles faintly at the little cherries. 

“I don’t have very many people in my life who are in my life permanently forever. They will always be there for me. I will always be there for them, you know? There’s Finn and Rose, and this town and… you. I mean, at least I think I’ve got…”

“You do.” 

She smiles at him, and he lies awake the rest of the night thinking about what he can do to make his Rey happy again. 

In his dreams he holds her, and in his dreams they’re happy together.

***

 

“You’re impossible to reach.”

Leia huffs over the phone, and he just knows she’s got it jammed between her ear and shoulder while she signs off a clipboard for some delivery and has a secretary timidly following her. “You left no messages on my machine.”

“If I wanted to talk to a machine, I’d talk to my VCR,” Ben snaps. 

“Sharon, please move my one o’clock to 1:15. And get me some Advil, I’m getting a migraine,” Leia barks, holding the phone away from her mouth slightly. 

“I love it when I talk and no one listens. Reminds me of my childhood.”

“You’re calling on a day the banks are open. Are you dying?” 

“Do you still own the house we lived in before you and dad divorced?”

There’s a beat, and he knows he’s caught Leia off guard. “Yes, of course.”

“Is it still nice inside?”

“How should I know? I haven’t stepped foot inside it since—” she abruptly cuts off. Neither of them utter the word, as if it was a taboo curse. 

“Sell it to Rey.” The line is as silent as death. “Mom?”

“Hold on. I’m looking up ‘aneurysm’ in the medical dictionary to see if I just had one,” she deadpans. 

“I’m very serious,” Ben says. 

“That’s ridiculous! She could barely afford it with what I pay her,” Leia exclaims. 

“She has money saved,” Ben points out.

“But she’s so…” she trails off. “Scrappy.”

“She’s the only employee to work under you that you haven’t fired. I even remember you firing a maid for putting walnuts in your salad.”

“That’s a gross exaggeration,” Leia interjects. 

“But you kept Rey,” Ben emphasizes. 

“I hope you’re not this transparent in front of her. It’s embarrassing,” Leia scolds. “You’re like a schoolboy.” 

“I care about her,” Ben says quietly. “If anyone was to live in our old house, I’d want it to be her.” 

“That was Han’s house,” Leia says, her voice low. “God knows how she’ll decorate it. I’ve seen her taste in decor. She has the ugliest chair I’ve ever seen in my life, Ben. It’s mustard yellow.”

“Dad would’ve loved her.” 

Leia inhales sharply. There was no denying the similarities between them, and for reasons Ben couldn’t understand, Han had been it for Leia. They may not have worked out, but there was something unspoken there, the ghost of a relationship. 

That’s how he knows he has her. “Fine. But you’re cleaning out Han’s junk from the attic, and you better call me once you do. I left some things up there that I want back. They’re gathering dust up there, along with the rest of your potential.”

It was always a pleasure to do business with Leia Organa. 

 

***

 

“What are you wearing?” 

Rey is standing behind _his_ counter, wearing _his_ blue flannel and a backwards baseball hat, a pot of coffee in hand. 

“I thought this was the uniform.”

“I asked you to watch the counter. Not to go rifling through my closet,” Ben says. 

Rey just blinks at him, cocking her head. “Wow. You look...you look nice. Really.”

Ben looks down at himself nervously. He put on a blue button down and a black sport coat with slacks, and he’s wearing a nice pair of leather shoes that belonged to his father. “I had a meeting at the bank. They like collars.”

She self-consciously takes off his baseball hat, running her fingers through her hair. He gets a whiff of her fruity shampoo from the cross breeze. 

“Oh, before I forget, do you think you could come over tomorrow?”

He arches a brow, trying to casually lean against the counter, but he only manages to knock over a napkin dispenser. Running his hands through his hair nervously, he says, “Yeah, sure. What for?”

“I need help moving. Into the house I just bought.”

“Look at you!” he exclaims. “No more spider infested potting sheds.”

“Don’t get mad,” she says, holding out her hands, “but your mother is the one who sold it to me. She said it was your childhood home. I promise I’ll take really good care of it.”

“I’m just surprised she sold it to you,” Ben says. He hadn’t spoken to Leia for three months, and he assumed she had gone back on her word. 

“Sorry, am I not worthy of it?” Rey demands, hurt. 

“Of course you are!” Ben backtracks. “But my mother is pickier than I am. One time, I brought a girlfriend home, and she told the girl, ‘Don’t feel bad, honey. Dumb girls crave smart men. It’s the whole Marilyn Monroe-Arthur Miller syndrome.’”

“Well I’m not your girlfriend,” Rey snaps, her eyes blazing. His heart stings like a whip on flayed skin. “And I’m not marrying this house. Your mother respects me as an employee, and she thought of me to sell your old house to, so you’ll have to deal.”

“Rey I—” 

“Hey, boss, something’s up with the oven. Can you come take a look?” Mitaka appears from the kitchen, his face coated in grease. 

Ben runs a hand through his hair, tugging at it with frustration. Rey pulls out a notebook and frostily sits on the stool, her back to him. He spends the next hour in his nice slacks fixing the oven in the oppressively hot kitchen, angry with himself. He shouldn’t have said anything; she bristled with pride easily. She reminded him sometimes of Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice in that way. 

When he’s finished, Ben dusts off his pants and wipes down the tables, cursing when he realizes there’s a grease stain on the knee. 

“Fuck, this is my good pair.”

Rey grabs his hand when she sees him scrubbing his knee with a napkin. 

“No, here. Let me.” She wets a rag with some dish soap and forces him to sit on a stool, kneeling as she works at the stain. 

“Rey.” She concentrates on the stain, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth adorably. “I’m sorry. For earlier. The Solo’s are known to rival the Barrymore’s for their dramatic productions.”

The corner of her lip quirks. “I overreacted. I have, like, 6,000 pages of case studies to memorize and this whole big test on the Wal-Mart phenomena coming up next Friday and because I have a life and a job and business school's not the only thing I have to concentrate on I'm behind, and I'll probably fail and then that little 18-year-old annoying gnat who sits behind me will get another 'A' and make that 'I'm smart you're dumb' fact to me for the rest of the week and I'll be very upset and will possibly cry. And on top of that, I have to move into a house. I’m very hormonal.”

“Wouldn’t Poe be able to help you study? He’s a teacher after all.” 

When she keeps her gaze down, her lashes tangling together over the hollow of her eye, it’s as good as confirmation. But he needs to her her say it. 

“Rey.” Her gaze flickers to him, as it always does when he says her name, because he wraps his tongue around it like a sacred relic. “It’s ten on a Friday night. Why aren’t you in Hartford?”

“Hold still,” she says. 

“You’re scrubbing my knee too hard!” he yelps. 

“Stop being such a nancy-boy about the pants. Think Hemingway ever gave a crap what his pants looked like?”

“Hemingway blew his brains out, also. How much of a role model do you want me to make this guy?” Her scrubbing eases up, the look of consternation on her face causing his voice to soften in response. “You wanna tell me what’s up?”

She looks up. In her gaze he sees a thousand secrets, but he only wants to hear one right now. 

“Poe and I are on a break.”

His heart twangs, the noirish self-destruction that had buried itself in his bones suddenly evaporating. He finds himself ascending into an opiate haze for a brief moment, before he remembers the exquisite sadness which with she gazes up at him. 

“I’m sorry.”

Rey rests her hands on his thigh, shaking her head. The heat that radiates from her hand is brilliant, enough to convince him that perhaps she is made out of fire, and he ice. “Don’t be. He’s teaching a summer course in Toronto right now, and I needed some space.”

“How long ago did this happen?” he asks, brushing his pinkie along hers. “Did you even wallow?”

“Wallow?” she repeats, sliding back onto the stool beside him with a dubious expression. He can still feel his thigh, and his pinkie, burning. 

“You know. Wear pajamas all day, eat nothing but gallons of ice cream and tons of pizza, and sit in the dark and watch a sad movie and cry.”

Rey snorts. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Ben stares at his feet. He would like to believe she wasn’t heartbroken over their split, but she clings onto things so fiercely. Sometimes, he thinks she’s afraid to upset any balance in this town, as though one ripple in the pond would cause her entire life to fall apart. Any loss to Rey, the perpetually abandoned child, was devastating. “You mean you didn’t watch _Ishtar_ and avoid shaving your legs for a week?” 

“I’m not the kind of girl who falls apart because she doesn’t have a boyfriend. I’ve been on my own all my life, and maybe I should just get used to it,” she says. 

“You won’t be alone,” Ben says fiercely. “You’re special.”

“Like stop-eating-the-paste special?”

“Rey.” He lowers his head to her level. “I’ve seen how you are with guys. You have a comeback for everything and you smile just right, and you do that little hair thing, and then you leave and they just stand there amazed.” 

Her breath hitches. Something in her expression...it shifts somehow. Her eyes are soft, but alive, bringing to mind crisp autumn leaves and dancing firelight. They’re searching his face—for what? Sincerity, or ingenuity, the hallmark of a seasoned liar. He can’t name the expression she wears. Hunger? A certain desperation for his words to be true, maybe. Whatever it was, she never had looked at him that way before. 

“You’re sweet, Ben,” she says, standing. “But that just isn’t true.” 

_Then why do I still feel the same about you?_

 

***

When Ben shows up to his father’s—or now, Rey’s—house early Monday morning with a box of requested muffins. 

When he gets in the house, all the brand-new furniture Leia ordered is piled in the living room, there are tarps everywhere, and there are ten workers with hard hats in the kitchen surrounding Rey. 

“Milk, cream, and sugar is on the table. Flo’s got coffee, who needs a jolt?”

Ben shakes his head at her nutrient-free layout of Pop Tarts, bagels, donuts, and now—

“Muffins!” Rey cries. “Boys, we now have muffins!”

“These were for them?” Ben asks, and despite his large frame, he’s being pushed around by the eager workers. 

“Did you think I was going to eat my weight in muffins?”

Ben pulls Rey aside into a dark, secluded corner. “What is all this?”

“The place needs a new roof,” Rey explains. 

“Leia?” Ben guesses, crossing his arms. 

“She offered,” Rey says sheepishly. “The place also had a mold problem, and they got rid of the termites last week. Leia said she actually set aside money for you to use when you moved into this house, but...you never did.” 

“I always thought she withheld my trust fund from me so that I would fail here, and slouch back to New York. Slouching back to her,” Ben says. “I never thought she would have approved of me staying here.” 

“She just wants you to be happy,” Rey says softly. After a moment, she adds, “We all do.” 

There it is again. Her fear of upsetting some balance. As though confessing she cares for him would stop the Earth turning. 

If this were another world, one where Ben wasn’t afraid, he might have caged her between his arms and whispered, _“Say it.”_ And she would have gazed at him with her innocent doe eyes, lips parted, but still frustratingly silent. If he were feeling particularly indecent he might have said something along the lines of, _“Be a good girl and tell me what you want.”_

Of course, in his fantasy, she would have breathed, “You. Just you.” 

After a wasted moment of impossibilties, he shrugs his coat further up his shoulders and turns to leave. 

“Ben,” she says, stopping him. “I took your advice. I wallowed.”

He pivots, unsure of whether to consider this a good thing or not. “Did you?”

“I ate a family sized bag of salt and vinegar potato chips and went to bed at seven-thirty while watching _Love Story,_ ” she tells him. “You were right; I needed to wallow.”

He examines the stacked paint cans by the staircase, creamy yellows and blues. There’s purple wallpaper in a roll propped up against the door of his old room. Her old floral bedspread is rumpled on top of the brand new sofa, Leia’s favorite African art scattered on the coffee table he recognizes that Han made. He looks anywhere but at Rey. 

“So….are you over it?”

That tantalizing look returns, the one he couldn’t quite place. “Yeah. I’m over it.”

It’s a step forward. 

 

***

 

The diner is mercifully slow today. It’s a lazy Sunday in October; the air is crisp, the leaves are burnished, and the residents are all partaking in the annual Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser. He sees them as he makes his way to his uncle’s market, unfortunately parked right next door to his diner. 

Skywalker’s Market was also mercifully free of Luke, who was playing auctioneer at the bidding. He was enjoying his quiet morning shopping for groceries until a loud, annoying girl tore into the store. 

“BEN!”

Rey slams into him, grabbing hold of his arm. Despite her haste, she still visibly notices his change of clothing. Luke made him accompany him to an early morning service at the Stars Hollow Church slash Synagogue, where he was forced to watch the Priest chastise the alter boy for eating the communion wafers when he got hungry. Ben wore a snug white sweater and a Breitling watch, a gift from Luke that he couldn’t help but enjoy. His change in appearance startles Rey.

“Did you forget to do a load of laundry?” she asks, breathless. 

He’s rendered speechless for a brief moment, admiring her outfit. She’s wearing a dark blue turtleneck sweater underneath a carmine corduroy jacket, the tight jeans doing their job well. He has to rip his eyes away before she notices, but he decides to walk behind her the rest of the day. 

“Nevermind, you have to come with me!” She snatches his basket of groceries and tosses it to the side, attempting to drag him outside with her. 

“What are you doing? I’m trying to do my grocery shopping!”

“Do you have money? I need money,” she says, frantically patting his pockets to find his wallet. 

“Stop touching my ass!” 

“Ben, you gotta come out there with me. Amilyn gave my pictures to all these guys because she thinks I need a man,” Rey pleads. 

Ben’s hackles rise.“You do, one with a nice couch and a deep knowledge of Freud.”

“You have to come outside and bid on my basket.”

Ben swats her hands away, grabbing her wrists and holding them in an iron grip. “Are you serious?”

In truth, he thought she had someone in mind when she was preparing her basket. She was so eager, and she bought the Pop Tart flavor she least preferred, she he assumed she must have bought them for someone else. 

“Ben, one of them has seen _Ghostbusters_ one hundred and twenty four times. Another one of them is a snorkeler. They were up to twenty when I was last out there, I’m praying they’re still bickering.”

“Twenty bucks for two Pop Tarts and a slim jim?” Ben frowns, trying to recall how much cash he has stowed in his wallet. 

The door of the market tinkles as someone steps inside, and Ben can only see red as he sees a familiar man holding Rey’s pathetic basket. Rey is panicked when she catches a glimpse of him, crowding Ben into a corner. 

“I can’t go with him,” she hisses, gripping Ben’s jacket tightly. “God, do you think Amilyn invited him?” 

“I thought you two broke up,” Ben asks, bristling slightly. 

“His favorite pastime is leaving soppy messages on my machine and eating Froot Loops from the box while repeating my name over and over again,” Rey clarifies. “I can’t believe he’s here. He thinks this place is the sticks.” 

Ben places a protective hand on Rey’s back. “You didn’t...make this basket for him?” 

She raises her head slightly, her warm cheek still pressed to his shirtfront. “I was hoping Cody would bid on it. Last year I got my sprinklers fixed for free. This year I was gunning for my rain gutters to be cleaned.”

“So your interest in this is purely for home improvement?”

Poe was quickly approaching, his eyes flashing with recognition as Rey unsuccessfully tries to cower against Ben’s chest. 

“Rey?” Poe demands, marching in their direction. Ben knows Poe can see her burying herself in his chest, and there’s only one place his mind can go. 

And apparently, so does Rey’s. 

With a panicked squeak, she impulsively grabs Ben’s face and drags him down to her level. He feels the sensation of being folded like origami, but once her red lips touch his, he melts into her. Her mouth tastes sweet, butterscotch, as he swipes his tongue along her trembling lower lip. She hums, her fingers tangling into the hair at the nape of his neck. There’s a loud moan, and he’s embarrassed to discover that it’s him, though he can’t control it when she suckles on his lip and scrapes her fingernails over his scalp soothingly. He’s drunk on her fruity smell, the feeling of her hammering pulse under the hand that cups her neck, her intoxicating taste. He’s just about to reach up and card his fingers through her curls when they hear the sound of a basket dropping to the ground, retreating footsteps, the tinkling of the door. 

Ben knows he’s lost. To his surprise, for a brief second after the door closes, her lips move against his while she lightly traces the swell of his cheek. As if she didn’t even hear the door slam. 

As if she wanted him as much as he wanted her. 

The sound of the cash register sends her springing apart from him, slamming against the corn starch. He’s never seen her look so afraid before. 

“Thank you,” she croaks. 

She runs away as if her life depends on it, but his heart is still buoyed by the knowledge that for a full minute, she kissed him back.


	7. 2003 Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> don't drink NyQuil in front of your crush.

Ben can’t bring himself to walk into the aisle that houses the corn starch. It’s bad enough that he’s in Skywalker’s Market again. For him, it’s like visiting the scene of an unnerving crime. 

But after a week, he had no choice but to come here again. He ducks around, throwing things in his basket without really looking at anything. Ben was no soothsayer, because if he were one, he would have had the foreknowledge—a shiver, a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck, a sixth sense—that he would collide with Rey between the breakfast cereal and art supplies. 

“Oh!” Rey gasps, blinking hard. An uneasy laugh bubbles from her lips, a warbly sound. 

“Sorry,” Ben grunts, attempting to slide past her. It was a difficult maneuver with his hulking frame. 

“No! I should have signaled, or honked,” Rey jokes. They shuffle around each other so that they’re facing each other. She’s wearing a tight black shirt with red writing on it and a Buddha caricature. _For good luck rub my tummy._

He had done more than just rub her tummy. And it brought him no good luck. 

Her lips curl into a wavering smile. “I guess it was inevitable. Us running into each other. It’s a very tiny community.”

“I guess so.”

Ben glances over Rey’s shoulder at his uncle, peering at him with sympathy. _People buy food that they eat here, Ben,_ Luke had said. _It doesn’t matter. She’s gone,_ Ben replied. Luke had bustled around his kitchen then, preparing a cup of black tea for his nephew. _That one is always gone with the wind. She’ll blow back into town eventually._

“How’s the diner?” Her face is so open and warm, but full of a pity that he can’t stand. 

“It’s still there,” he grinds out. 

“Yes, I knew that.” After a moment, she bites her lip, trying to form words with an apparently leaden tongue. “Hey, Ben, do you think we could—”

“I gotta go.” 

Rey’s face falls. “Right. Okay.”

He doesn’t deign that with any parting reply. Ben has only managed to toss lettuce, ranch dressing, a large tub of peanut butter, and eggs in his basket. He checks out anyway, for once spared from Luke’s idle talk of Stars Hollow real estate. 

 

***

Leia is at the Dragonfly. Ben was forced to go there, too, at Luke’s behest. He’s forced to watch her sample soup for whatever DAR event she’s decided to host at the inn. 

“Haven’t you tasted that soup twice?” Ben gripes. He’s on edge; he hasn’t seen Leia in the flesh in over a decade. He’s shocked at how old she’s become. Her hair is a white-blonde, her mouth is tight and wrinkled, and she’s suddenly much smaller. In his memories, she’s always a six-foot despot, rather than a five foot old lady. 

“Are you keeping a running count?”

“I’m morbidly fascinated.” 

“Ben, when you taste anything the first taste acclimates the palate, the second establishes a foundation, and the third is to make the decision.”

Ben feels as though he never even left home. She’s wearing her blue St. John Knit suit, a brand which she is always wearing. When they lived in Stars Hollow together, Ben can vaguely remember his mother in Han’s flannels, the sleeves rolled up several times. She always did silly things to please him, even if it meant discarding her favorite knit suits. _What’re you wearing that uppity crap for?_ Han would laugh. _Put on a pair of goddamn jeans and a sweatshirt like everyone else._

“Goody, there’s going to be a third taste.”

Leia puts her spoon down daintily. “Isn’t that what this is for? To taste?”

“Taste, yes. Not to orally deduce their chemical structures.”

Rey appears then, in a white button down, the first few buttons distractingly undone. She approaches the table with a chipper smile, a vastly different one than the one she reserved for him. 

“Rose says she can provide more soup samples if these eight aren’t enough,” she tells his mother, clasping her hands together earnestly, as though in prayer. 

“The women in my D.A.R. group are very picky,” Leia complains. “Hedy Johnson once served a pâté that was slightly less than the appropriate temperature and she was ostracized for a month.” 

“If I may.” Rey brushes alongside Ben, reaching past him to grab a bowl on the far end. Her strawberry kissed hair tickles his nose; it’s a warm fragrance that has recently struck up the long-buried urge in him to nuzzle her hair despite his allergy to the fruit. She always smells of sweet fruits—oranges, berries, peaches; all drizzled in caramel. “The mushroom is a great choice. It’s super popular.”

Rey’s eyes dance away from his. “It’s Ben’s favorite,” she adds, softer. 

This draws his attention. It was a small moment after a torrential downpour. Ben was fixing her porch rail (after falling onto it while cleaning out her rain gutters) and had to take refuge inside her—once his—house. Her smell was concentrated there, but after he turned his nose up at her stale leftovers and pizza bites, she fed him a pot of mushroom soup that Rose had left in her fridge. He remembered that day for a different reason, though, because she enveloped him in a freshly laundered towel while he sat in nothing but his boxers on her rustic couch. She put on a corny movie and embraced him the entire time, even after his laundry was dry. 

“The mushroom will do fine,” Leia decides. In an instant, there are servers clearing away the table. Ben was used to her snap decisions; this soup tasting business was the longest she had ever taken for anything. 

“Well, that’s great!” Rey says, falsely cheered. “I’ll just, uh, inform Rose about your decision. She was hoping you’d pick the mushroom.”

Rey runs into his broad chest, her answering smile as sweet as rancid butter. It cut into his bones as she turned and slunk away, a threatened cat. 

“You know, there are millions of other girls in the world,” Leia says, swirling around a glass of wine. “And you can’t find one who will actually treat you right?”

“Oh, like it’s that easy,” Ben snaps. 

“You should have taken credit for the house. She would have kissed the ground you walked on,” Leia says. “I could say something, if you’re so dead set on her. Lord only knows why.” 

“I don’t want you interfering in my relationship with Rey,” Ben growls, bending low over the table. “This is my life, and I thought I was clear I want you to have nothing to do with it.”

“Relationship?” Leia scoffs. “Sitting around, playing golden retriever, hoping someday she’ll turn around and fall in your arms? That’s not a relationship, Ben. That’s nothing. You have nothing.”

“If she doesn’t want to be with me, then _fine_ ,” Ben roars, knocking a plate to the ground. It rolls around noisily, but Leia never even flinches. 

“Have a little self-esteem,” Leia says, rolling her eyes. “Are you going to sit around your whole life, hoping that she changes her mind? I didn’t raise you like that.”

“Is wanting someone so bad?” Ben implores, sliding into the seat across from her. “Is it so terrible to wish that we might get it together in that stupid Dan Quayle, golden retriever, grow old together, wear matching jogging suits kind of way?” 

“Ben, I was that girl,” Leia points out. “When I met Han, it didn’t matter that my father was sick, or that his business was failing, I just took off. Married the carpenter, had a kid, abandoned everything. All because I felt the same way you do now.”

Ben sighs. “Is this where you tell me I’m fucking stupid and it’ll never work out?”

His mother takes a large swallow of wine. “Do you think it will?” 

“How should I know?” Over Leia’s shoulder, he catches Rey laughing with Finn the vegetable man, her head thrown back with his favorite toothy smile stretching across her cheeks. Ben says, defeated. “I’m just the guy who pours her coffee.”

***

It takes Rey thirty minutes of pacing outside the diner to invite herself inside. At some point, she works up the nerve to rush inside and sit before him. Ben continues to doodle her name on his notepad. 

“Hey.” Today, she wears a flattering brown dress, her golden-brown hair pushed back with a pair of sunglasses. He can see the patch of honeyed tan on her freckled shoulders from her outing last week. 

The one she took to avoid him. 

“Hello,” he says lightly. 

“Good donut selection this morning,” she says, leaning over to examine the glass container. “Good variety, good color, goodness.”

He walks further down the counter, the tip of pencil cracking under the unrestrained pressure of his hand, clouding her name with a black smear of lead. 

“Well the choices are all there, it all depends what I’m in the mood for,” she babbles, following him. Much like the first time she came into his diner. “Sprinkled, or chocolate, or jelly, or glazed. Maple, apple, or raised—hey, little donut rhyme there.”

She giggles at her own joke, letting it fade and clearing her throat when he remains unresponsive. “Never mind. Can I get chocolate with sprinkles please?”

Wordlessly, he picks up a donut with a pair of tongs and slides them into a bag which he holds out for her. She takes it, frowning. “This is how it’s gonna be with us now?

Ben blinks innocently. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re pulling a Mr. Freeze on me.”

“Am not.”

“Oh, please. I’m going to need snow chains just to get out of here,” Rey argues. 

Ben pulls out his strongest pot of coffee and pours it in a to-go cup, hoping the message is very clear. “I assume you want coffee with your donuts.”

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Rey tells him, exasperated. “Did you get my note?”

He recalls, the night she left, the piece of paper stuck to the door of his diner. _I’m sorry,_ was all it said. And then she left for a week, returning as if nothing had happened between them. 

“Got it. I enjoyed the Garfield stationary.”

“Ben, please,” Rey begs. “If you’re mad at me, then act mad. I don't like this robot talk.”

“What is it, exactly, that you want me to do? I feel I’m being polite. I listened to your donut bit, I got you your coffee. What would make you happy?” 

He watches the range of emotions that pass over Rey’s face, everything from sadness to fury to resignation. Finally, she mumbles, “I want Ben back.”

Ben’s heart inches away from the armored cage he holds it in, toeing its way outside for just a moment. But he can’t forget the avoidance, the way she pretends nothing passed between them, and he locks it up again and swallows the key. 

“He’s standing right here.”

Her face falls. With a shake of her head, she whispers, “No he’s not.”

***

Rey stands in the kitchen of the Dragonfly, contemplating a box of Hamburger Helper. When Rose sees it, she’s on the verge of a seizure. 

“No. Put that away.”

“But I want lunch,” Rey gripes. 

Rose snatches the perceived abomination, hurling it into the trash can pointedly. “I’m making beef stew. You can have a nice, tender cut of beef and buttery potatoes instead of this processed garbage.” She crushes a clove of garlic with the flat of a blade. “Why do you have to cook, anyway?”

“I wanna really cook like on the Food Channel. You know, sauté things and chop things and do the BAM, and I wanna arrange things on a plate so they look like a pretty little hat. I wanna be the Iron Chef!” 

“Why don’t you go to Ben’s and have a little Peaches and Herb’s time together,” Rose suggests, wiggling her eyebrows. Rey is used to this level of half-hearted teasing from her friend, but for once it sticks like glue. 

“Hey, what do you think of Ben?” Rey asks, her voice pitching. 

Rose smiles archly. “What do you mean?”

“Like, do you think he’s cute?” It feels like a dialogue between teenagers, her heart picking up pace as if Ben is about to walk by and stuff something in his locker, unaware of her consideration. 

“You finally owning up to that crush?” 

“What?” Rey splutters. “This is Ben we’re talking about.”

“Um, I know.” Rose starts to wipe her hands off on a damp rag, turning her full attention to Rey. “I couldn’t help but notice you two were fighting. Do anything stupid lately? Like avoiding him for a week?”

“That’s not fair,” Rey protests weakly.

“Yes, fair. The fairest. The Snow White of fair.” Rose’s face is stern. “Come on, what happened. He was throwing people out of the diner last week, so I know you did something.”

“Nothing!” Rey insists, throwing her hands up. “Poe came back to town, and I didn’t want to talk to him, and Ben…”

“And?”

“We kissed! All right?”

“You and Ben?”

“Yes.” Rey turns her back to Rose, pouring a cup of lukewarm coffee for herself. She always could think more clearly once caffeine was pulsing through her blood. Blowing her brain cells out, Ben would say. “I kissed him, and he kissed me back, and I don’t know, I just felt so stupid.”

“So you had a thing with Ben?”

“It was _not_ a thing,” Rey insists, searching the landscape outside the window for an escape route. She was always looking for a way out, wasn’t she?

“A kiss is a thing.” 

Rey spins back around. “It wasn’t planned!”

“Listen, Rey,” Rose says, approaching her like a wounded animal. “You have got to make up your mind. If you want Ben, go get him. There he is. Grab a liver treat and a squeaky toy and run to him. But do _something_. Ben is sweet, and supportive, and incredibly patient.” 

“I know all of this about Ben!” Rey growls. 

“It hasn’t stopped you from dragging his heart all over this town.”

A defensive plume of anger rises in her throat. She grinds her teeth, fighting back the urge to lash out. Rey didn’t want to be the villain in this narrative. Ben was not some lovesick schoolboy, casting out a line with a wiggling worm on the end and waiting years for Rey to notice. _He would have done something back in ‘98._ Finn and Rose would have her believe that Ben was the kind of man to sit back and let her come to him. That wasn’t what she knew of men. They always knew what the wanted, and they came to her when they wanted it. 

If that were true, though, then why would he sit around for an eternity letting her pass him by? Why not just say something? He wasn’t one for pretty words and poetry, but a grunt of acknowledgment would suffice. A necklace, flowers, a napkin with hearts on it, any indication that he wanted her would have been nice. It made her blood run hot with frustration. 

Rey felt herself sweating by now, and she wished she could crack open the damn window. It was so hot in the kitchen, with all those boiling pans, and the stench of onions stinging her nose and eyes. 

“Why do I have to be the one to make or break this?” Rey rips open the fridge door and lets the cool air temper her boiling skin. “I mean, what do you think would even become of it? That we’ll be some Norman Rockwell couple who end up with the same face in the end like Lennon and Ono? That Ben will suddenly have a penchant for stale Chinese food and watch Hee Haw Honeys on the couch with me? It’s delusional.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Rose murmurs. 

Rey lets out a ragged breath, the truth of it clawing her insides. She thought this would run its course, that she could forget what it felt like to be safe in his big arms. In the Poconos she had been watching Hee Haw Honeys and picturing how Ben would fit beside her like a puzzle piece. 

“I thought I could fight it,” Rey admits, her voice wavering. “I didn’t want to lose him. But it’s happening anyway.”

“You can’t undo the kiss.”

“I can if I slip him a Quaalude,” she jokes quietly. 

The kitchen staff has been ignoring her, but one of them shuffles behind her to grab a stick of herb butter from under her arm. Rey steps away from the fridge now, her head hanging. She hadn’t  
imagined how severe the consequences of letting something fester inside of you for so long would be. 

“Life isn’t a time capsule that you can return to in fifty years and expect everything to be just the way you left it,” Rose points out. “You can’t do this dance forever.” 

“I know I just...I don’t know what I want yet. Please don’t say anything? Just until I figure it all out.”

Rose pouts. “Oh, come on. Half the town has a bet about this.”

“I don’t want my personal life debated in a public forum,” Rey pleads. “I’m not Winona Ryder.”

Rose relents, but she calls out to her as Rey is leaving. “Not everyone is your parents, Rey. He wouldn't leave you just because things get hard.”

***

Ben has rarely set foot in the Dragonfly. He likes to keep a distance from any of his mother’s establishments. Shortly after moving into town, Leia saw the decrepit inn which reminded her of the Walton’s house, apparently. An old man named Mr. Kenobi—of the Stars Hollow Kenobi’s, a family that had been here since the Revolutionary War—owned the establishment. Like a tiger, she waited for him to croak and bought the place up. By that time, they were already living back in the city. 

_I’m thrilled,_ he remembered Leia saying after getting off the phone. _The Dragonfly property finally went on the market. That Kenobi man had been drinking. The only drawback of course, is that we had to rent the place furnished, and he had dreadful taste. The library is pink and green!_

_He got his,_ Ben joked bitterly. Mr. Kenobi had always been nice to him, giving Ben butterscotch candies every time he saw him. 

His mother didn’t get the irony. _Now you’re just being morbid._

On his birthday, she’s at the inn. It’s the event she was tasting soups for, but she has a present for him, or so she says. 

“Now, tonight we’ll be dining with service a la Russe, which has nothing to do with Russians — thank god — because in my experience, their table manners are nothing to emulate. All it means is that the servers will be passing each course in turn instead of plopping all the food on the table at once, like some mukluk picnic,” Leia was saying to her fellow Daughters of the American Revolution member. 

“Mother.”

Mother. It was the single word uttered for a long time as they sat in a secluded corner beside a grandfather clock and they watched some poor server fumble with the difference between fish forks and roast forks. 

Leia maxed out at minute sixteen. “The Kennedy clan would sit at the table and have lively debates about everything under the sun. They’d quiz each other about current events, historical facts, intellectual trivia. The Solo clan is just as smart and worldly as the Kennedy’s, so come on.”

Ben kissed his teeth, trying and failing to collect the angry thoughts swirling in his brain. “Did you know that a butt model makes ten thousand dollars a day?”

“Camelot is truly dead.” Leia took a sip of expensive champagne, just in time for Ben to notice a particularly frightening painting hanging in the lobby. 

“What the fuck is that?”

His mother glances absently at the behemoth oil painting. “That’s been here for years. Your girlfriend never told you?”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Ben spits. “And I never posed for this, how did you get this done?”

“I had it done off your senior picture. You looked so handsome with the bangs. Besides, I tried to get a painting when you were thirteen but all three painters quit when you wouldn’t stop scowling.”

“I was going for a Billy Idol thing,” Ben snaps. 

They’re silent for another minute, watching the pendulum of the clock sway. “Lando Calrissian, you remember him? The lawyer? His daughter just got married,” his mother says. “She just got married, and she never told her father. When you get married, I want you to tell me.”

Ben furrows his brow, unsure of how to reply. But she continues. “I’m giving you access to your trust fund.”

“I thought it was a mythological thing,” Ben admits. “Like Excalibur or something.” 

“I never told you much about the baby food business I got into while I was here,” Leia starts. “After I started having to hand strain your baby food—you were a pain in the ass even then—I started to sell it. Anyway, people really eat up organic shit, and a few years ago I was able to sell it to a pharmaceutical company. For three million dollars.” 

Ben’s jaw drops. The Amidala fortune had been split up between Luke and Leia, and so Ben suspected what money he was gifted would be coming from the dregs of Grandpa Skywalker’s business, one that had gone belly up in the end and was sold. 

He was a millionaire now. What was he supposed to do now? Pay taxes and die? 

“Of course, that’s on top of what was originally in there,” Leia goes on. “It was never enough to live your life on, not without working, but Grandpa left you with enough to be comfortable. I know you don’t remember him, you were just a newborn, but he loved you. He left you every penny he had.”

“I didn’t know he liked babies so much,” Ben says. 

“I know I had a difficult relationship with him. But he would have wanted you to do something special with that money,” Leia says. “I know he would be proud that you built yourself up all by yourself. But if you wanted to move on, no one would blame you.”

Ben deliberates. There had to be more than Stars Hollow, he knows that. Truthfully, he had never thought about other paths for his life. Franchisement, if he wanted to make his own wealth, or isolation on some farm somewhere. Anakin grew up on a farm, maybe he would like that idea. Or maybe he could just buy a nice apartment that wasn’t too small to even be considered a living space. 

“So what’s the catch? Sunday night tea? Wednesday night bridge club? Monday night football?” 

Leia looks at him sharply, and for the first time, behind that hard diamond exterior, he sees a human being looking into his soul with imploring eyes. “You owe me nothing, Ben. I just wanted to do something nice for my son, that’s all.”

***

To his surprise, Rey returns. Paige waits on her in the corner, but Ben notices something isn’t right. She’s sneezing frequently, and she’s keeping a mound of dirty tissues in her pocket. Rey looks so lonely and pathetic, Ben finds his resolve wavering. 

Rey orders a large helping of mashed potatoes. 

He brings her chicken noodle soup alongside her mashed potatoes. Because he remembers she never had parents to make her peanut butter toast with bananas or magical soup as a kid. 

When she sees who brought her something with vegetables in it, her face softens. Rey doesn’t eat anything that provides essential nutrients, he knows this. She thrives off of leftover pizza and Pop Tarts, and his own burgers.

It isn’t a truce, but it’s a step back in the right direction. When he clears away her plate after she’s done, she’s actually eaten all the carrots. 

***

After another few days, she’s brave enough to seat herself at the counter again. She doesn’t say a word at first, which is more haunting than anything, but he knows it’s because he didn’t go to her birthday party. 

He wrestled with himself about going. Upstairs, there’s a bag with a pair of kitty potholders, because he doesn’t know what the fuck you’re supposed to get a girl you care about for her birthday. But he didn’t go. 

Just because he knew it would hurt her. 

But he’s beginning to think this—freezing himself out of Rey’s life as a punishment—isn’t worth it. 

“Coffee?” 

She laughs quietly. “Of course. I’m Cathy Coffee, the bastard offspring of Mrs. Folger and Juan Valdez.”

Ben just stands there with one pot in each hand, slowly formulating a response. As usual, she beats him. 

“Yes, I’ll have coffee.”

When she takes a sip, her eyes light up. “This is an exceptional pot of coffee.”

Stupidly, Ben almost blushes. “I added nutmeg.”

“Oh?” Rey darts her tongue out to lap a few drops like a kitten, Ben’s cock twitching in his pants as she does. “That’s very Richard Simmons of you.”

Ben shrugs, and for once it seems like Rey doesn’t know what to say to him. She clears her throat. “I’d like one fabulous cheeseburger, please.”

After a minute, when he realizes the burner hasn’t even heated up yet in the kitchen, Ben whips out a pack of cards. His father always used to carry them in his pocket at the store. It was how he got over the horrible, angsty silences Ben put him through. 

“Five card draw,” Ben says, dealing. Rey smiles to herself. 

Rey squints down at her lot, frowning. “Give me four.” When he deals her new cards, she frowns at those too. “Bah. Four more.”

“You can’t have four more,” Ben insists. She’s just like his father. 

“These don’t help me,” Rey protests. “And I’ve vowed to discard anything negative in my life.”

He relents. He always relents. 

They play for a few minutes, and he beats her. His reward is to see her nose scrunched up in frustration. She’s very competitive, but he should have remembered that from when she broke her leg during a yoga class. 

“This is fun,” she murmurs. “You know maybe sometime, maybe, we could—”

“Order’s up,” Mitaka calls, shoving Rey’s burger on the counter. He rips off his apron, wiping the sweat from his face, and tosses it over a chair. “It’s Dungeons and Dragons night, boss. I’m out.”

“Thank God!” Paige cries, leaping from her supine position across two chairs. “We’ve been planning this campaign forever.”

The two of them are left alone, and if he were a different man, this would be the time for some sweeping romantic gesture. But he was the son of a man who proposed to Leia by shoving a ring in her hand with a gruff, ‘Here.’ It was never in the cards for Ben. If Rey couldn’t understand the depths of his affection for her through the way he acted, rather than the few words he said, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be. 

At the very least, he knew he couldn’t hold her at arm’s length forever. 

She takes a deep breath, and begins to talk. “Sometimes I don’t know how to process things. My brain gets full and reaches capacity, like Shea Stadium when the Beatles played. It’s all cramped and girls are screaming and I think George is fighting with Ringo.” 

Rey clears her throat, effectively stopping the babbling. “I needed space, I—I just want to go back to the way things were. I miss you.”

Ben begins to wipe down the counter, methodically circling the towel around and around. “You could have talked to me.”

She frowns. “I know.”

“You lose my number?”

“I have it memorized,” she counters. 

“You could have written. Sent a fruit basket. Smoke signaled,” Ben lists, scrubbing harder and harder. 

“Ben.” Rey slaps her hand over his, stopping his erratic movement. Through her teeth, she grits out, “It was stupid and I’m sorry. I was embarrassed. And I would never, ever do anything to jeopardize our friendship. That’s why I took it so seriously.”

Ben works his jaw, the muscle in his eye leaping. 

“What can I do to make you happy?” she pleads. 

Sometimes, Ben felt that it was his lot to be unhappy. But for now, he could think of something small that might suffice. 

“Next time,” he tells her, “Stay.”

***

“Wow!” Rey glances around the empty diner, comically surprised. “Empty?”

“You’re early today,” Ben says. 

“Can I sit wherever I’d like?”

“Wherever.”

“A luxury I never dreamed of,” Rey says, fanning herself dramatically. “Should I sit at this table with it’s unobstructed westward view of the wide cosmopolitan expansive Klump Street?”

Ben rolls his eyes. “Great.”

“But you can see all the way to the garbage cans behind Al’s Pancake World. Not appetizing. Or I could sit in the corner - you know, the Mafia table so that no one can come up behind you and whack you with a cannoli,” Rey suggests. 

“Because he left the gun and took the cannoli, right?” 

Rey sidles up to the counter, her hand over her heart. “I’m so proud of you. I told you sitting through the three hours was worth it.”

“Not with Hux behind me. He’s a mouth breather,” Ben says. 

“This is perfect,” Rey says, smoothing her hands along the counter. “Now I can play bagel hockey. Or you could entertain me. Dance, burger boy, dance!”

“Will you marry me?”

Her heart catches in her throat. “W-what?”

Ben shrugs. “Just trying to shut you up.”

Today, despite the bone chilling cold, Ben looks as though he’s sweltering. His black hair is tousled, falling in his face with a messiness she hasn’t seen before. It’s either artfully curling around his face, or tucked beneath her blue baseball hat. 

“You look awful. Are you okay?” Rey asks. 

He gives her his best unamused look. “Thanks. It’s just a cold.”

“A bad cold, then,” Rey decides, judging by the purple shadows beneath his eyes. She uses the back of her cool hand to measure the heat of his sticky forehead. “Jesus, you’re burning. I don’t think you should be working near food.”

Ben swats her hand away. “I don’t get sick. Unlike you, I eat things like oranges and grapefruit. When’s the last time you ate a vegetable?”

“I had lettuce on my burger,” Rey answers easily. 

“I watched you pick it off!”

“Ah, but it had lettuce essence on it.” She watches him fish a bottle of Ibuprofen from the very back of a junky cabinet and swallow two pills dry. “Ahsoka and Armie both were sick last week. I bet you caught a bug.”

Ben stubbornly begins to scoop coffee into his machine. She notices he upgraded—it’s sleek and expensive, with four pots instead of two now. He spoons in some nutmeg to the mix. “If my Dad was here, he’d give me a bottle of Advil and some Vicks and tell me to tough it out, that I was building natural defenses against disease and that nature would take care of it. If it were my mother, she’d have a foreign nanny make me strange concoctions that miraculously cured me.”

“Though having a bug isn’t glamorous, I think people would forgive you for taking the day off,” Rey insists, reaching over the counter to tug at his sleeve. “If you want, I could tell them something interesting.”

Ben regards her for a moment, his eyes soft with fever. “Like what?” 

“That your leg is haunted.”

“Huh.” Ben sniffles unattractively, the sound long and wet. “I don’t want to leave Mitaka and Paige to deal with everyone themselves. It’s a zoo in here midmorning.”

“ _I_ will do it,” Rey declares. “I’m like Wonder Woman. I can do anything.”

Actually, she’s already doing mental math in her head about the extra cash from Kaydel’s shop she’d lose out on, and how she’d definitely have to pay the electric bill late—she needed to call Steve and ask for and extension—and maybe Armie would install that new DSL for a discount if she flirted. Oh, and this definitely meant at least two nights of no takeout, which meant she’d be squirting some Paul Newman into a bag of lettuce...

“Why are you doing this?” Ben asks. 

She frowns; it was such an odd response for a man she had come to care for so deeply. Though, it was possible her affection was a quiet, unspoken kind. For a long time, it felt like she was driving a car and Ben was hanging onto the bumper. It was about time to let him inside. 

“I would do anything for you.” 

His gaze flits across her face, as though trying to decipher hieroglyphics in an alien book. 

“Okay, Rey,” he murmurs with a wistful smile. “It’s all yours.”

***

After an entire day running Ben’s business, Rey is sincerely sorry she didn’t stumble into the diner on that dreary day all those years ago with nothing but the coat on her back and beg to be his waitress. She could have wormed her way up and maybe run a diner of her own. This was _fun._

She oriented herself with diner lingo quickly and was serving the last few customers. 

“Hey, Mitaka. Get me a hockey puck with wax and make ‘em cry, frog sticks and bullets on the side. Plus a houseboat with extra maiden’s delight, and…” she turns to Galen Erso, who sits down with his usual three newspapers, stone faced. “What’ll it be, Galen?”

“Poached eggs on toast.”

Rey waits a moments, swaying back and forth. “Okay, say you want the eggs scrambled.” Galen stares blankly. “Please? And say you want it with a Coke.”

They stare at each other for a few long moments. Mitaka pokes his head around the corner to see what’s taking so long. Rey doesn’t think anyone has ever won a staring contest against Galen, but he must be hungry. “Fine.”

“Mitaka, get me an Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ‘em. And a Shoot from the South special.”

Paige is taking care of the stragglers, so Rey takes off her apron and slinks into the kitchen, unsurprised to see that she managed to get coffee stains on her pink shirt. 

“Hey, where’s that bag of groceries I bought? I want to bring Ben up something to eat,” she inquires. Paige checked up on Ben a couple of times during the day, bringing him rye toast (or Whiskey Down, as Rey learned) and rice, since apparently you were supposed to eat a bland diet while you were sick. 

Rey would always eat tuna sandwiches and Campbell’s. 

“I’ve never seen Ben eat Campbell’s soup or instant mashed potatoes,” Mitaka tells her, smirking. “Even sick, he’ll turn his nose up at it.”

“He’ll eat what I give him,” Rey says. She wants to take care of him, since it doesn’t seem like anyone has taken care of him in a long time. “I had Paige send up a bottle of Nyquil. He won’t know the difference.”

Just in case, she cuts up some fresh carrots and dumps them in the soup. She arranges everything on a nice tray, even adding some toast on the side like Paige did—and cutting off the crust—and throwing in a few saltines alongside his soup. 

“When did you become Donna Reed?” Mitaka barbs. 

Rey shifts nervously. She smells like onions and coffee, her hair is thrown up in a greasy bun, and there are new stains cropping up on her shirt. Ben always looked perfect, despite running this place every day, and he certainly never smelled like fast food. No, he had a spicy scent, like cloves. 

She invites herself into Ben’s apartment, which she’s never been in. It was once his dad’s office, but she assumed it had to be large enough to live in. But it was dorm sized, with floral curtains, a dinky TV, and clothes hanging from a line strung across the “living room.” 

Her breath catches in her throat when she sees Ben stretched across his flannel sheets, his broad back rising and falling slowly. His legs are bare, one tucked up to his chest and the other falling off the end of the bed. One arm is flung across his face while the other hangs limply off the mattress. 

Stupidly disappointed, she quietly sets his tray of food on his kitchen table—which seated four, though she’s sure no one has ever eaten up here with him—and tries to sneak out. 

When he stirs, she smooths the curls away from her eyes and curses herself for not bringing perfume or something with her. She must have reeked. 

“Rey?” he croaks, staring blearily at her. 

Like a girl possessed, she’s drawn to him. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” 

_How did I not see it before,_ she wonders, gazing at the long lines of his blue veins intertwining along the soft flesh of his forearm. Her chest coils with longing. _He’s beautiful._

“That Nyquil is strong.” He sits up, his words slurred. “Did you run my diner into the ground?” 

“No,” she giggles, her cheeks tainting with blush. “I did learn how to speak in diner. Bloodhound on the Hay was very popular today, mostly because I kept forcing people to order it. Blonde with Sand is a staple for your customers, so I don’t see how you can get on me about my coffee habits when the whole town seems to have an issue. I suggest you start serving Heart Attack on the Rack, even though this isn’t a southern establishment. I bought a packet of mix and tried it out, and people seemed to really...like it.”

She trails off, shy under Ben’s steady gaze. The heat of it makes her shiver. He runs his fingers up her arm, something he hadn’t done since he helped her find her lost chick. The memory, she’s sure, must be written on her face. 

“What would I do without you?” he murmurs, brushing a stray curl from her eye. “It’s like my life isn’t even real if you’re not in it.”

Rey can’t stand it anymore. His eyes are too penetrating, an x-ray into her heart. Her eyes fly to the bottle of Nyquil on the nightstand, half empty, and she knows he has no idea what he’s saying. 

“I should go,” she tells him, gripping his hand in both of hers and laying it gently on his chest. “I need to shower. One day at your diner and I look I’ve been on some monthslong acid trip in Haight-Ashbury.”

Ben intertwines their fingers again, swinging her hand back and forth. “You look nice.” 

It’s not poetic, but it still has the power to make her heart cramp. “Call me tomorrow morning if you need me to fill in again. Just keep calling until I pick up, because your yapping will wake me up since I can’t throw you against the wall to shut you up, insuring the wake up process.” 

Ben shakes his head. “Stay.”

“Stay?” The word comes out like an accusation, as though he’s said something terribly wrong when in fact he’s said the word she’s been dying to hear since she came up here, the one she didn’t know she wanted to hear. 

He pats the sliver of mattress beside him. “Please.”

She hesitates. Rey is logical; when she has a problem, she pragmatically thinks it through, all the solutions and outcomes, and makes her decision based on her estimations. The ‘Ben Problem’ has presented her a myriad of issues, including how badly it would hurt if he ever left her. She could never step foot in the diner again, the town would divide itself, her heart would be irreparable. 

There have also been the girlish fantasies. Sleeping beside him has been one of them, though she never imagined sliding into his sweaty sheets, smelling of coffee grounds, flush against his sticky body. 

“Stay with me,” he whispers one last time.

“Just until you fall asleep,” Rey relents. She perches herself along the edge of the bed, and Ben plucks at her jeans unhappily. 

“At least get comfortable,” he insists. She only agrees because only a masochist would lay in bed wearing denim. But she’s wearing a pair of cotton underwear with dancing fruit, apparently not having learned from last time. 

She can’t even fathom asking him to help her with something so intimate now without (much) humiliation. Everything seems so heightened now; electric. 

Ben nearly purrs with satisfaction. Rey fixes his covers so they lay neatly over him, and he lays down to face her. Like a child, he removes the rubber band holding her hair up in a bun, letting her hair fan out around her on his spicy smelling pillow. He’s content to play with the frazzled ends, still damp from this morning. 

“Do you ever think it was fate when I met you?” Rey wonders aloud, thinking about every event in her life that led to this moment. Her abandonment, her foster homes, running away and finding herself stranded in a storybook town straight out of a Disney movie. The memory of stepping off the bus with her last dollar, hungry and afraid, is so vivid in her mind. 

Was all of that misery just so she could meet Ben? Out there, somewhere, did someone mean for her to end up against Ben’s sweltering, virus ridden body at this very moment? 

“There’s no fate,” Ben says, his toes stroking her bare calves. “Astrology is ridiculous. Tarot cards tell you nothing. You cannot read a palm. Tea leaves make tea and nothing else.”

“I’d like to hear you be optimistic just once,” she comments. 

Ben drapes an arm around her stomach. “Would that make you happy?”

“Yes.” There were butterflies blooming in her stomach where his fingers touched her sensitive belly. 

“I just like to see you happy,” he admits. “Would it make you happy if I told you my plan?”

“Your plan?”

“I don’t like to make plans, normally. When you have plans, you have expectations, and when you have expectations, you’ll be disappointed,” he explains. “But I made plans anyway.”

“Shoot.”

“There’s no one who will be more here for you than me,” he says, tracing circles on her stomach. “I will never leave. Not if you want me to stay.” 

“That’s your plan?” she asks, puzzled. “What if…” she swallows, her stomach sinking at the thought. “What if you want more?”

“This is all I’ll ever need,” he assures her sleepily. 

To be told that you’re enough to stay put—

That’s all Rey has ever wanted to hear. And it’s the one thing she never has heard. Until now.

“Thank you,” she whispers. Boldly, she brushes just one lock of hair away from his cheek. “You should go to sleep now.”

“Okay,” he says, half swallowed by the darkness already. He turns his head away from her, though he tightens his hold on her belly. 

“Goodnight, Ben.”

“Night,” he slurs, his voice muffled by the pillow. He seems to like the way her fingers softly scrape against his scalp. Then, he hums contentedly, and in a voice that is very nearly indistinguishable, he sighs, “I love you.”


	8. 2003 Part 3

Ben dreams about a dancing pancake smoking a Cuban cigar with the voice of Louis Armstrong. When he wakes up, he thinks he dreamt about Rey, too. But he always dreams about her, so he doesn’t think anything of it.

At first.

His face is buried in the pillow, blessedly free of the headache that made him nauseous. Cold air nuzzles his back—wait. The window is open. _Did I open it?_

He becomes keenly aware of the smell of caramel and coffee.

_Rey._

It returns to him slowly. His face buried among tendrils of her soft hair. His nose nestled in the crook of her neck, the irritating little snores he heard when he groggily came to every few hours.

_She stayed the night._

Ben tried and failed to think of the last time he had been taken care of. When he lived with his mother, it was always some foreign nanny. Ibuprofen was his nurse when he lived with his father.

And it was as good a nurse as any. But the thought of Rey playing Florence Nightingale for him?

That meant everything.

But she was gone. As always. And that meant something, too.

He takes a long shower, wondering whether or not Mitaka or Paige opened for him. Tries not to think about sharing a bed with Rey. Fails.

He’s still rolling up his sleeves when he enters the diner, but he finds it’s already busy.

Rey is behind the counter, a pot of coffee in hand. She changed out of her pink shirt and into a band tee with a black jacket, her hair thrown up in a messy bun.  

“Mitaka! I need some dough, well done, with cow to cover with hen fruit and mystery in the alley.” She bounces around, a pencil behind her ear and a huge grin on her face.

 _I could get used to this,_ Ben thinks. Another voice, one that mimics Leia, warns, _don't_.  

“Paige, get me three glasses of moo juice for the triplets. Oh, and make sure their checkerboards are ready, pronto. Dormé looks like she’s about to throw those kids away.”

Ben watches her, blinking stupidly, as she scoops coffee grounds into the machine. Her pots are incredibly strong. It's like drinking tar. Hux stops eating his oatmeal to grimace at the blacker than black coffee.

“You'll blow your brain cells with one cup of that stuff,” Ben jokes.

With a squeak, Rey falls over the table, sweeping everything to the floor. He tries to catch her elbow, but she yanks it away as her face grows ruddy.

“That’s the third time I did that today,” she tells him. Though after the efficient work ethic he just witnessed, he judges that to be a lie.

“It’s a bit. Part of my silly walk. I’m in a John Cleese mood.”

Ben is silent for a moment. She’s squirrelly, hopping from foot to foot with her eyes averted. “I’ll get the broom.”

Rey ducks into the kitchen, as if she can't wait to get away from him.

It dawns on him. _What did I do last night?_ He must have upset her somehow. He could have thrown up on her. Made her uncomfortable. Or maybe she was just embarrassed about staying the night.

Ben trails after her, a thousand scenarios running through his mind.

“You all right, kid?”

She’s studying a can of tuna, her back to him. When he asks her the question, she whirls around with wild eyes.

“Yeah! I just...well other than the cats on my porch.”

Ben smirks. “Cats?”

“I found three on my porch. I think they’re trying to tell me something,” she explains sheepishly. “It’s probably all that sitting at home thinking, ‘If only I could find a man like Aragorn.’”

“You really could use a Dr. Phil book.”

She laughs, but her eyes don't participate in the smile. Rey plucks at a nonexistent wrinkle in her shirt, head down.

“Rey.” He goes to stand beside her, placing a hand on her elbow. “Is this about last night?”

Her eyes dart to his. “Last night?”

“I can tell something is wrong. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.”

He watches her mouth open and close like a goldfish.

“It's…you didn't. I just—”

“Please tell me I didn't throw up on you.”

Her face dims for a moment before she collects herself. A sharp inhale follows, and then her face is wiped of anything but a pleasant smile.

“You were completely out of it. We're talking Farrah on ‘Letterman.’”

His stomach unknots itself. A smile of relief can't help but stretch across his cheeks. “I must have made poor company. Didn't you try to wake me up?”

Rey laughs, and the sound is bitter. “You have no idea.”

 

***

 

“He wears expensive cologne just to flip burgers. Pro or con?”

Rey groans, tucking her arms inside of her red coat for warmth.

“This isn't a joke.”

Finn grins wolfishly. “He yelled ‘Finally’ at the end of _Love Story._ Pro or con?”

“Con. Definitely con.” Catching herself, she shoots Finn a stern look. “Not funny.”

“I bet he watches Charlie Rose before bed. That's a sin against mankind,” Finn continues.

“This isn't to perm or not to perm,” Rey hisses. “I have a lot to consider. If I wake up one day and decide that I don’t like the way he eats or how hums incessantly, then he gets hurt.”

“You mean Rey gets hurt,” Finn amends.

She says nothing.

“Fine. What _does_ go on your highly classified pro-con list then?”

“Anything that affects the success of the relationship,” she explains, her cheeks reddening. Maybe she was a child, but at least she was organized. “If he can handle me. His diet, schedule, romantic inclinations.”

They reach the head of the line for food. Rey had never been to a high school hockey game before, and she didn’t plan on doing it again, but nachos drenched in gooey yellow cheese and jalapenos made it entirely worth the trip.

“And how's that working out for you?”

“It’s been a week,” Rey sighs. “I’ve been talking myself in circles. My brain is full. It has reached capacity. It's Shea Stadium when the Beatles played. It's cramped and girls are screaming and I think George is fighting with Ringo.”

Through a mouthful of hot dog, Finn says, “Your list is overcomplicated. Let’s make it simple. Do you like coffee?”

“Only with my oxygen.”

“Ben has coffee. Pro. Is Ben attractive?”

“Well, I mean—”

“Pro. Do you secretly harbor the desire the wear his flannel?”

“What? No!”

“That was a euphemism for sex.”

“Oh.” Rey pinks.

“Pro.”

“Con: it could ruin our entire friendship.”

“The only thing ruining your friendship is your annoying habit of avoiding him when you have to deal with the fact that he likes you,” Finn argues. “Why is it either wedding bells or death with you?”

“They’re very trendy. J-Lo has them all the time,” she snaps.

“What’s the big deal! He likes you, you like him. It could be a cool relationship.”

“Cool relationship? That’s like saying an understated Nicholas Cage movie.” She presses the heels of her gloved hands into her eyes. “God, everytime I think about it I have a nervous breakdown.”

“All right.” Finn is thoughtful for a moment. He turns away for a moment, staring out toward the game. When he turns back to her, there’s a twinkle in his eye. “Forget the list. If you answer yes to my next question, you'll know everything you need.”

She raises an eyebrow. Her stomach flutters; half anxiety, half longing. “What?”

“Does the fact that Jessika Pava is flirting with Ben make you jealous?”

_“What?”_

Rows below where their seats were stands Ben, who is flanked by Jess and Kara Kun. Jessika was a tiny brunette, the town sweetheart who taught kindergarteners.

She rounds on Finn. “You knew he was sandwiched between two of the prettiest girls in town and didn’t think to tell me?”

“Hot girls tend to run in packs.”

Through her teeth, she grows, “ _Not_ helping.”

Rey prowls back to the corner of the arena they jammed themselves in. “What’s her deal?”

“You,” Finn says, pointing at her with a french fry, “are a brat.”

“I’m curious!” Rey rushes to say, defensive.

“Remember that there’s cute jealous and then there’s Othello.”

“You're horrible.”

“You’re green,” he quips. “They used to call Jess Bambi in school, you're safe.”

“Safe,” she scoffs. “She probably thinks they're on a date.”

“You know, if you stopped overthinking, you could be having your _From Here to Eternity_ moment right now if you wanted.”

“Sure.” She’s still staring at the back of Ben’s head, the one she thought she knew inside-out. “I could also decide to join the Bangles. I’ll buy a guitar, quit my job, and ruin my life.”

“You’re impossible,” Finn declares, exasperated.

Her eyes trail to the man in question, a bittersweet pang stabbing her chest. Jess lightly touches his elbow, and a possessive response bubbles in Rey’s throat like bile. _He loves_ me.

She studies the apologetic hunch of his spine. When he turns slightly, bending down to hear Jess, his profile is thrown into sharp relief. She wonders how it’s been for him all these years, what kind of emotions she stirred in him every time she flounced into the diner. If it was as painful for him to watch her ignore him as it was for her to see him ignore his feelings for her.

Her heart throbs. One big question gnaws at her.

_Can this work?_

“I’m getting more drink,” she tells Finn.

In the lobby area, the stares moodily out the window at the inky black parking lot. A hiss of cold air hits her for the millionth time. _Can’t you idiots just order all your food at once and glue your asses back to the bleachers?_

“Rey.”

That voice. Oh, that voice. It always softens her into butter, but now a coil tightens in her chest at the sound. She turns around to meet his direct stare, wishing she were one of those girls who enchants her clothes with French perfume instead of a blob of cheese.

“Hi,” she says through parched lips. “You’re here?”

“Where have you been?” His words come out like an accusation. What he means is, _why are you hiding from me?_

“Strapped for cash the last few days. I’ve been eating a hearty diet of ramen,” she lies.

His eyes narrow. “You know I would have brought you food.”

“I know.” _You shouldn’t be nice to me_.

With his hands shoved deep in the pocket of his coat, Ben takes a step back. She flinches; her heart stings as if he had reached out and slapped it.

“You know, I might be a sports convert. I mean, eating tons of junk food and listening to Hux make a fool of himself are all things I enjoy.”

He favors her with one of his rare lopsided grins. As if he can’t help it. “Is that so?”

“There’s something satisfying about watching people exercise while you eat junk,” she says, flashing a charming smile of her own. His pale cheeks taint with a faint red blush.  

“The diner is very quiet without you.”

The sadness in his voice slams into her with the force of a high-speed crash. But then her heart hardens for a moment as Jess peers over Kara’s shoulder to seek out Ben.

“I think you’ve managed all right,” she says with a sour look.

Ben’s brow knits in confusion. “Is something bothering you?”

Rey inhales sharply, wishing she had kept her mouth shut. “I need Dr. Pepper and a time machine,” she mutters.

A few weeks ago, she might have giggled at his bewildered expression. But now she feels bitter.

 _I ruined everything with that kiss._ _And you did, too._

The last thing she wants to do is talk about other girls. But the acrid pit in her stomach forces the words past her lips. “I just...are you on a date?”

A thunderous expression splays out on his face. “A date? Oh—Kara and Jessika?”

She nods, unable to meet his eyes. Shame claws at her insides, tearing her organs to ribbons.

“They needed someone to tell them what was going on in the game,” he says. When her eyes flicker to his, she finds them guarded.

He isn’t pleased.

“Oh.” Rey knows neither Jess nor Kara would have run away from Ben the way she does. They wouldn’t have selfishly kissed him in the cornstarch aisle. Or acted like hearing ‘I love you’ was a punishment, rather than a beautiful sentiment. “Are you any good at dating?”

Ben’s eyes widen, his breath catching. No doubt he was remembering Korri Sella, her dusky face and amber eyes. Or Bazine Netal, the first girl to break his heart. Was he thinking of the sensation of a soft brush of lips, or the smell of their skin? A shiver crawled down Rey’s spine at the thought that Ben might think of her that way, all intensified sensations.

“No. Definitely not.”

“Me neither,” she confesses. “I’ve never been very good at it. Too much ‘what if.’”

Ben stares at a point on the floor, ill at ease. Behind them, the crowd whooped as the Stars Hollow Minutemen scored their first goal all night.

“I like things I can count on,” Rey murmurs.

Ben straightens, his eyes alight with hope. “Rey?”

Her hands tremble under the intensity of his gaze. She wishes for a moment that every worry whizzing through her mind would evaporate. That she hadn't grown so afraid of losing people. That Poe hadn't hurt her. That her love of this town, and everyone in it, didn't rival her feelings for Ben.

She sighs. “Why are relationships so hard?”

Ben visibly deflates before her. “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

There it is. That splintering feeling, the urge to run. She might, if it weren’t for the pint of liquid cheese in her stomach.

“Does it make you sad?”

With a resigned shake of the head, he answers, “Every day.”

_Can you ever forgive me?_

 

***

 

Sixteen.  

That’s the number of days he goes without seeing Rey. It feels like a betrayal.

It wasn’t obvious at first. But something was off. Wavering smiles, wild eyes, frequent meetings to attend. And then it clicked: she was avoiding him.

The epiphany came in the form of a snark from his mother.

“Do you think you’ll be single your entire life?” she asked blithely.

He had opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Six years. How many more would he have to sacrifice for this girl?

At the hockey game, there was a moment. He had been hurt by her absence—and she knew that. But then there was all that talk about dating, her sour remarks about Jessika Pava, the bed-sharing. He knows what it means when a girl is jealous. There was a fleeting moment when he thought she was making her Rose Dewitt-Bukater decision. The way she was looking at him...

But she wasn’t even talking about him. Clearly she had lied to him when she said was over Poe.

Let it be the last time she made a fool of him.

She was throwing Rose a birthday party, and half the town was going over to her house. Ben had never gone. He was the type to slump in a chair thinking about what he could be doing at home instead of watching Snap vacuum chips off the floor with his mouth.

But he longs to see her.

Ben detests parties. He slips inside, unnoticed, hit by a wall of Madonna music. It looks like Pepto Bismol exploded on everything. An eighties theme, then. He weaves through a sea of people and makes a beeline to the kitchen for a drink, frowning when the only drinks left are Shirley Temples.

“Shirley Temple black,” Riyo Chuchi supplies with a wink. Despite being the daughter of a governor, she has roseate hair and is immensely proud of her belly button ring.

 _Teenagers_.

The cell phone he caved in and bought rings. He fumbles with too-large thumbs while a chorus of happy birthday rises in the background.

“Ben?” The sharp voice of his mother cuts through the line. “Oh, good. After dealing with the usual level of incompetence, I managed to pin down that nice townhouse in Hartford for you.”

Right. He forgot all about that. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

“You’re at a party.”

“Birthday thing,” Ben says weakly. “I have to go.”

“It’s the maid,” Leia guesses. No, not guesses; she has a sixth sense. “I thought you weren’t—”

“We aren’t,” he interrupts tersely.

“But I already wrote her name in my revenge notebook.”

“Mother.”

“You deserve better,” his mother says softly.

He can’t remember a time in his life when she’s ever been tender like that. When he was a baby, maybe. A day out from Han’s death she was already saying things like, _“What are you going to do without a college degree? Drive a forklift?”_

“I’ll sign the papers this week. I’ve got to go.”

He can hear someone plodding into the room behind him as he quickly clamps the wretched little phone shut. His heart shrivels up when he hears a familiar teasing voice.

“Oh, Justin is so dreamy. He can’t marry Britney, I’ll just cry and cry and—oh.”

Rey halts in her tracks, giving a little hiccup. He can’t believe the effect she still has on him, standing there in a Bon Jovi hat and a haphazard low bun .

She wears a wan smile. “You never go to parties.”

Ben tries to push down all the feelings he’s having. How would the old Ben have responded?

“First time for everything,” he shrugs.

She inspects an invisible spot on her shirt for a moment, reading his mood. After a second, she decides to play friendly host.

“Well, help yourself to all the food. I slaved away all day. The meatball explosions are particularly inspired.”

It was the standard food court fare. Pizza and subs supplied by Hutt’s Pizza Parlor, Mexican food from the Andors, ice cream from the soda shoppe. She spared no expense.

“A Valhalla of international cuisine,” she quips, noting his disdain. “You should start slow. It takes years of training to eat the way I do. My four major food groups are pizza, Chinese takeout, sweets, and burgers.”

Ben makes a face. “How are you not four hundred pounds?”

“Scientists call it the Rey Paradox.” She shuffles around the kitchen, sticking a fork into the half-eaten store bought coffee cake on her table. “I have wine glasses that say Holiday Inn on them if you want something that isn’t pink.”

“That’s okay,” Ben refuses gently.

She frowns. “Who were you talking to? Just now, I mean.”

“Leia.”

Rey glances up, the concern in her eyes belying the casual tone of voice. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine.” Ben hesitates. Would the old Ben have divulged anything more? At the time, he was all monosyllables and jerky shrugs and enigma. There was another version, Rey’s Ben, that was a gentler sort of beast. And then there was this version—cold, wounded, uncertain.

The wounded part of him wins. “She was just calling about a house I was looking at.”

“House.” Rey looks away in a fit of exasperation. Tries to collect herself. “You’re moving then?”

“Maybe,” Ben admits.

A disbelieving laugh escapes her as she clutches a chair with a white knuckled grip. He zeroes in them, contrasting them in his mind to all his own red knuckled, bloody teenage rages.

“Right, well. It’s not like we tell each other everything,” she says. “I’ll have to get used to it. You not being here.”

He bristles. “I’ll still pour your coffee and flip your burgers.”

“It won’t be the same and you know it,” she snaps.

“You still have a house and friends and a job and an iron stomach. You’ll be fine,” he bites, temper flaring.

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like Mondays, but unfortunately they come around eventually.”

She nods, turning away from him to stick plates in the sink. “Any other news?”

“Like?”

“Oh, you know,” she spits, her voice laced with acrimony. “Rip any holes in your boxers? Open a franchise?”

“I’m sorry. Did I miss the thousands of phone calls, or did the postman lose all those letters you wrote to me?”

Rey turns, indignant. “Excuse me?”

“You think everything is your business,” he bursts, chest heaving. “That everything is about you. News flash: some things are not about you.”

“I know that,” Rey sniffs, crossing her arms.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Ben growls. “I’ve been tying my own shoes since I was four and I’ve been making my own decisions since I could crawl!”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I owe you _nothing_.”

Her eyes flash with anguish. “Fine.”

“Then why do you care?” he demands.

Her tongue tries to wrap around words that might form an adequate response. It reminds him of the feeling of her tongue in his mouth, and he flinches involuntarily.

_You should have never kissed me…_

“I care,” she insists, chin up.

When Ben was a child, he spent a lot of time with his nose stuck in comic books. It kept him occupied. In particular, he preferred the X-men. Maybe it was because he felt like an other for a long time. But he always fancied the idea of being able to press into someone's mind and just _know_. Find out who they really were. See their intentions, their dreams, their thoughts laid out like colored pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on a coffee table.

That's what he wanted for himself now. Just to understand Rey, push past her defenses. He was tired of being held at arm’s length. It would be easier if he implicitly understood what she couldn't articulate.

Ben takes a step forward, driven by the conflict in her hazel eyes. His voice softens. “Why?”

 _Last chance_.

The way she tries to communicate to him with her eyes is utterly indecipherable to him now, the way it is most of the time, everything getting lost in translation. She knows this. Frowns. Opens her mouth a few times, like she always does when floundering for an answer.

“I…” She deliberately eschews eye contact, ripping her defunct form of communication away from him. “Because you…” A dark flush creeps up her neck. “Actually, I—”

There’s a collective whoop from the living room, a dull roar in volume. On cue, the bedroom door off the kitchen bursts open and Dorme’s triplets scuttle out, screaming their heads off as the stupid Hutt toddler gives them the chase. Tallie quickly follows, her face coated in cheap, sloppy makeup done by little hands.

Rey is bewildered, weakly protesting as Rue clings to her leg in fear.

“Hey, that teacher guy left a message on your machine,” Tallie dutifully informs Rey, corralling the remaining triplets. “Come on, guys. It can be your turn to play Hungry Hippos.”

With an ursine growl, Ben brushes past Rey. Everything carries on with a horrifying normalcy. Paige’s band, Follow Them to the Edge of the Desert, tune their instruments. Rose squeals as she opens presents. A drunk Maz and Ahsoka are singing show tunes. Amilyn Holdo is teaching Hux to dance while ‘Like a Virgin’ plays.

He can’t hear it over the sound of the dam in his heart collapsing.

 

***

 

Of course. Of fucking course. What did she ever see in this guy?

She storms to the answering machine and slams the play button. Poe’s hopeful voice emits from the device, tempting her to reconcile over a David Bowie concert. What a low blow. Once she graduated from school, she was never setting foot in Hartford again. Too many Poe’s walking around there.

“What did you do to him?” Chewie leans against the wall beside her, a beer in hand.

Rey laughs bitterly. “I do too much cardio salsa, apparently. I should go for cheap from now on. Sloppy too—bald spot, beer gut, you know, and the kind of pants the slip down in the back, giving you a good plumber shot. Sounds safer.”

“Well, cheap and sloppy just stomped upstairs,” Chewie tells her, pointing.

She inhales, the butterflies in her stomach beating their wings in time to her stampeding heart. It might just have to be her move. Briefly, she wonders if she has any cold medicine lying around.

“Make sure the place doesn’t burn down,” Rey says.

Chewie salutes. “Yes, sir.”

“Remember: two or three crackheads at most. They eat all the good cereal.”

As she makes her slow descent up the stairs, she feels everyone’s eyes on her. It makes her feel like a used car.

Ben is in her bedroom, standing in front of her dresser. There are clothes flung everywhere, because the cute black dress she planned to wear was mysteriously stained with marinara sauce. Self-consciously, she realizes she’s been talking to him in a shapeless black hoodie and an old Bon Jovi hat stolen during the time she lived with Unkar and worked at a concert venue.

“I hate it when I’m an idiot and I don’t know it,” she begins, tentatively. “I like to revel in my idiocy. Take pictures. Good Christmas card opportunity.”

When he doesn’t turn, she pleads with him. “Won’t you talk to me?”

The powerful muscle of his back, which she can see through the tight black sweater he wears, ripples in anger. “Why,” he says, his words blistering. “So you can make another pro-con list?”

In his hand, he holds the piece of stationary she had been scribbling on for the past three weeks. Panic seizes her, effectively putting her entire nervous system in a wheelchair. God, how _stupid_.

“I’m a rat,” she blurts. “God, I’m such a rat. You weren’t supposed to—”

“You knew, didn’t you?” His voice is dangerously low. “I know I wasn’t exactly subtle, but…” he trails off, rubbing his jaw. The muscle of his eye twitches. “And you ran.”

“It’s just a silly list. It means nothing,” she implores.

“Nothing,” he repeats flatly. “Do you know how long I—” He stops, overcome with emotion.

Rey toes the door shut. The party downstairs has grown eerily far away.

“When you first came to town, I thought you were irritating. You were young. You talked too much, you were annoyingly social, and you were a people pleaser to a fault. All still true,” he says. “But you snuck up on me.”

She blinks, uncomprehending. Because it couldn’t have gone on that long. Impossible.

He prowls around, a rippling carnal energy with every step. “I was patient. I watched you flirt, listened to you babble on about the men you were eyeing at the Dragonfly. And then there was Poe, with his expensive car and fancy degree, and still I waited.” In a violent fit, he hurls the paper to the floor. “I thought, ‘My God, will she date anyone before she dates me?’”

His voice is filled with such raw devastation, it steals the words away from her. When he speaks again, his voice is bitter. “If only I had known that having a crazy uncle, a distant mother, or patchy beard would count against me, I would have given up a long time ago.”

“Ben, no,” she cries at last. “It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?” She moves to catch his sleeve, but he pulls out a chair to block her. She’s stands there, stricken. “Is it a joke to you? Because I want to know when it stops being funny. When you’re at the altar? When I’m pushing forty, still a bachelor, still the town hermit?”

“Of course not! I didn’t even know until—” she stops herself, gripping the chair between them tightly.

“Until what?”

“Until…” _God, what a mess._ “Until you said so! On your cold medicine.”

His face darkens with disappointment. Her face darkens with shame.

“I should have known. You always run.”

“That’s not true,” she insists. “You know I fancy myself Wonder Woman, but you know where I came from. There was nothing constant…” she swallows. “I can’t imagine my life without you. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Don’t cry, Rey,” Ben says, his voice mocking. “I’ll always be the guy who pours your coffee.”

Frantic, she marches to the wastepaper basket, overflowing with discarded yellow paper.  “This isn’t a joke to me! The opposite, actually. It’s been killing me, Ben.” She crushes several balls of paper in her fists as she speaks, hurling them at him when she finishes. “I just needed to _think_.”

“How long does it take?” Ben demands, his hands shaking. _Is he tearing up?_ “What the hell do I have to do to meet all the requirements on your _list_.”

“It wasn’t just about you. My job, my home, my life would be affected.”

“Forget them!” Ben shouts fervently. “Rey, people in this town need to be medicated in a rec room with hand puppets. They don’t matter.”

“How can you say that? They’re family.”

“What about me? Don’t you understand? What you do to me every single time you run away to ‘think?’”

“I needed space!”

“I didn’t,” Ben snarls, suddenly rushing towards her. He grabs her by the shoulders and gives her a shake, as if he could rattle the worries right out of her. “I wanted as little space as possible. One hundred clowns crammed into a Volkswagen. That’s how little space I wanted.”

The fire blazing in his eyes die, the passion that consumed him quickly melting into resignation. He retreats, putting a careful distance between them.

“When does it stop? The wanting you,” he murmurs. “You’re like some mythological creature that put a spell on me.”

He reaches into his pocket, pulling out his wallet. With trembling fingers, he pulls out a yellowed scrap of paper. “I always hold onto things. My dad’s store, his car, the grudge against my mother.” As he speaks, he smooths it in his palm as if it were some ancient relic. His eyes flicker to hers, deep reservoirs of feeling. “And you, too.”

Slowly, he allows the scrap to drift from his palm and flutter to the floor near her feet. His throat bobs as it sits between them. Reluctantly, she picks it up. She doesn't know if he wants her to see it, and maybe he doesn't know himself, but it's obvious she has to look.

It takes a moment to register. At first, it just seems like a newspaper clipping. She knows Ben isn't into astrology, but then she sees the handwriting.

If a heart could break a rib cage, she's sure hers would have now.

“You said it would bring me luck.”

“I will say anything for a cup of coffee,” she croaks. “I can't believe you kept this. In your wallet? You carried this around?”

“Six years.”

_You will meet an annoying woman today. Give her coffee and she’ll go away._

“You didn’t hate me, then?” she asks in a small voice.

“Not then, not now, not ever.” He shrugs helplessly. “I don’t have it in me.”

The numbers start to add up. It becomes apparent that he’s it—the whole package. And she _wants_ it.

“Six years,” she repeats.

There's a stab of guilt deep in her gut. Now that he's drained of anger, all that's left is a lingering sadness that penetrates the space between them. She would sell herself to the devil, in any form, if she never had to see that look on his face again.

She takes two quiet, measured steps toward him. “You never said anything.” Her voice shakes on the word _never._ “All those years.”

His lips curve into a small, self-deprecating smile. “I don't say much.”

“No,” she breathes. “You don't.”

He stares at her for a long time, his own loneliness seeping into her bones. The room is full of junk: her wadded up clothes, jewelry, her extensive blanket collection. But it had never felt more empty.

“I’m always gonna love you, kid.”

“I know.”

She’s always been good with words; as a child, she could argue her way out of any trouble, so long as she kept the angry party confused. If she had to guess, it started in New Mexico. Her cousin had dozens of taped movies that she would sit and watch while devouring family sized bags of Doritos for comfort. She learned everything she needed to about talking.

Of course she wanted the perfect speech. She had thought of nothing else for days. All the classic romances had been watched. For the first time, she felt clumsy and inadequate. Like nothing she could say would make up for how she's treated him.

He had said it twice now. There was no preamble, no torrential downpour, no sweeping romance. Yet he did a better job than a thousand of her crumpled speeches ever could have.

She has to try.

“I wasn't avoiding you. I just...being confronted with it, not being able to pretend anymore—”

“It’s okay.” Ben steps forward and gently squeezes her hand. “It is what it is. You and me.”

He tries to flee, because it’s all too painful for him to hear. She grabs his wrist on impulse. A fire builds in her chest, a concentrated ball of heat and that detonates all at once.

That’s when it happens. She doesn’t even realize what she’s doing—only that she has to make him understand. Yanking him down to her level is no small feat, either. All she knows is that her lips crash into his, fierce and bruising. Ben is rooted in place, completely pliable but utterly still.

Cheeks flushing, she extricates herself. Ben blinks once, then twice, and by the third time her throat is tightening. Their lips had fit together like a key into a lock, and he seemed to fit in here. Not literally—he was too much of a Hulk to be in any room and not make it seem as though it were built for Barbies—but in a way that she could see his flannel strung up in a tiny corner of her closet, or his fancy cologne hidden amongst her cheap perfumes, and maybe she didn’t even mind the idea of his stubble coating the rim of her sink.

That’s how she knows it’s the right choice.

Ben just stood there. His fingers twitched at his sides, his mouth invitingly red. It seemed to take tremendous effort for him to formulate words. “You—” he runs his fingers over his mouth, catching a phantom thread. He clears his throat, less dazed now. “Why?”

“Because I love you, you idiot!”

There’s a pregnant pause. She steels herself for a horrified reaction, waiting for the insistent thrum between them to break. It’s a feeling that’s been there all along, she realizes, like some kind of theremin sonata. And then—

He’s striding towards her with purpose. Gathers her into him, slants his mouth over hers. He hesitates, just for a moment, before gently pressing his lips to hers. It’s a searing kiss, the kind that makes her weak in the knees. It makes their grocery store kiss, which left her panting and dripping in the alleyway of the shop afterwards, seem like child’s play.

She feels his rakish grin against her lips before he tightens his grip on her, only encouraging him to kiss her harder.

“How’s that for unromantic?” he teases, referencing her list. Seeing her cheeks blaze, he presses a soft kiss to each one.

“God,” she breathes. “Are we going to be the John and Yoko of the town now?”

“I have no idea.” His voice is smooth as warm brandy, his fingers tangling into her hair and folding her head protectively under his chin.

“Luke will probably call a meeting.”

“Mhm.”

“There will be ribbons.”

“Rey.”

“Flags will fly at half mast.”

He pulls back, cupping her cheeks. “I’m ready for anything.”

Ben flips the hat off her head for better access. As he tilts his head down, she can’t help but tease him. “You’re going to kiss me now? How incredibly predictable.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re very annoying?”

“You still love me, though.”

A fond smile tugs his lips as he chucks her under the chin. “Yeah. Lucky thing, too.”

A thrill rushes down her spine at his words. His mouth hovers tantalizingly over hers, and they would be in the middle of a heated kiss if it weren’t for the solid thump at the door.

It creaks open slowly, revealing the thirty or so odd faces peering sheepishly up at them from their precarious positions in the hallway. The grannies (Maz, Ahsoka, and Amilyn) flank the sides. Finn, Rose, and Hux all crowd the front with Luke at the helm. Kaydel is actually crying.

To her surprise, Ben laughs. The tension breaks and everyone is laughing, high-fiving, exchanging money from bets. He takes three slow steps to the door, clamping his hand on the knob. Then he closes the door on their dear friends, his hungry eyes on her the entire time, leaving her dizzy and an inch away from melting into a puddle on the floor.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I DID IT!
> 
> this took me forever but I did it! thank you all for sticking with this story through this ridiculously long hiatus! I'm a little emotional because I love Gilmore Girls and not gonna lie, this was pretty fun to write 
> 
> thank you to Nancy and nite0wl for being very supportive, and also, Berry: I saw your twitter thread, ugly cried a little. everyone should thank you for motivating me to get this done in a timely manner!
> 
> I'm so stressed from school right now so distract me: what was your favorite chapter? do you guys have any head canons? does anyone want an epilogue (which, if I wrote, don't expect for a hot minute) and what would you wanna see!


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